"Humorist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Catalan edition, and received the remarkable reply that the prime-minister refused his offer to call lest he should succeed in convincing him, and Mendizabal did not wish to be convinced. This seemed to show that the Mendizabal was something of a philosopher and a little of a humorist. ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... if not of Ambrose's, which dashed the somber picture of war round Richmond, with high-lights boldly put in by master-hands! Of them were quaint George Bagby, Virginia's pet humorist; gallant, cultured Willie Meyers; original Trav Daniel; Washington, artist, poet and musician; Page McCarty, recklessly brilliant in field and frolic alike; Ham Chamberlayne, quaint, cultivated and colossal in originality; Key, Elder and other artists; genial, jovial Jim Pegram; Harry ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... poet of religious England: born 1731; died 1800. Cowper was an elegant humorist, despite the gloominess of his religious belief. It is said, however, that his most comic effusions were written during ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... resolution and infinite pains; and reading for mere reading's sake, instead of for the sake of the good we gain from reading, is one of the worst and commonest and most unwholesome habits we have. And so our inimitable humorist has made delightful fun of the solid books,—which no gentleman's library should be without,—the Humes, Gibbons, Adam Smiths, which, he says, are not books at all, and prefers some "kindhearted play-book," or at times the Town and County Magazine. Poor Lamb has not a little to answer for, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... lady, the creation of the American humorist Shillaber, distinguished for her misuse of learned words; also another celebrity who attempted to sweep back the Atlantic with her mop, the type of those who think to stave ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... His tent was right at the head of the street; he wanted us to come to him at any time for any question; it was his business (and again no twinkle) to make our minds as well as our bodies comfortable. Thus I get the impression that he is something of a humorist, yet also that his chief trait is aggressiveness. I cannot tell you why, for all was spoken with a quiet voice, even with a certain gentleness that disguises what I am sure is the basic character of the man. Knudsen felt it too, for ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... Oration. It is known chiefly through translation. The "Lincoln Stories" are stories someone else has told who may or may not have heard them told by Lincoln. They are like all translations, they express the translator not the original—final evidence that Lincoln's appeal as a humorist was in his manner, his method, not in his substance. "His laugh was striking. Such awkward gestures belonged to no other man. They attracted universal attention from the old sedate down to the schoolboy."(4) ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Ripe red lips curved generously over superb teeth; the cheeks were glowing, as were the eyes, the crimson below them deepening to splendor the velvet in the iris. The one severe line in the face, the thin, straight nose, ended in wide nostrils in the quivering, mobile nostrils of the humorist. The swell of the gourmand's paunch beneath the soutane was proof that the cure was a true Norman he had not passed a lifetime in these fertile gardens forgetful of the fact that the fine art of good living is the one indulgence the Church has left ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... life he was a humorist; idle in the extreme; but his invention was of the true Birmingham model, active. He could well design, but procured others to execute; wherever he found merit he caressed it: he was remarkably polite to ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... wrote it—a child with a child's imagination and a child's viewpoint and a child's ignorance of the things she wrote about. In a way of speaking it is like those unintentionally humorous obituary poems which appear in the papers. No professional humorist can hope to equal them because when he writes one he does it with deliberate intent to be funny and invariably he betrays his hand. It is when some poor mourning amateur dips a 'prentice pen in the very blood of his or her heart and writes such a poem that it becomes so pathetically and ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... which circle about the recollection of Thackeray in this country are very many, but generally unrecorded. They linger, and appear occasionally in allusions like those of Lester Wallack. But whenever they are told they pay homage to the humorist. They recall his constant, sturdy, kindly simplicity and kindliness. Wallack speaks of a certain boyish or boy-like quality in Thackeray. It was certainly there. He had the utmost sympathy with boys, and one of his gay caricatures of himself represents ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... Ha' yo' brought his muzzle, man?" cried old Tammas, the humorist; and, turning, climbed all in a heat on to an upturned bucket that stood by. Whereat the puppy, emboldened by his foe's retreat, advanced savagely to the attack, buzzing round the slippery pail like a wasp on a windowpane, in a vain attempt ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... "approve their methods"—let that be understood; and thereby they are sufficiently punished. The notion that a knave cares a pin what is thought of his ways by one who is civil and friendly to himself appears to have been invented by a humorist. On the vaudeville stage of Mars it would probably have made his fortune. If warrants of arrest were out for every man in this country who is conscious of having repeatedly shaken hands with persons whom he knew to be knaves there would ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... our genial humorist came near the serious reality of a duel he was the party challenged. The cause of the misunderstanding that promised to result so tragically was a magazine article in which the doctor caricatured a peculiar kind of Virginia Editor. ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... beginning at his hame-strap, always a difficult buckle, when Billy Jack called out, "Hold on there! You're too quick for me. We'll make them carry their own harness into the stable. Don't believe in making a horse of myself." Billy Jack was something of a humorist. ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... entitled, "The Phantom Portrait," in the Cornhill; which leaves the reader in doubt as to whether he has been egregiously "sold" or not; and, above all, the short and interesting—too short and most interesting—paper on THACKERAY, in Harper's Monthly, with fac-similes of some of the great humorist's most eccentric and most spirited illustrations, conceived in the broadly burlesquing spirit that was characteristic of GILRAY and ROWLANDSON. THACKERAY, philosopher and satirist, who can take us behind the scenes of every show in Vanity fair, who can depict the career of the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... came at stated hours. Obviously a widow, she had a poor, loose-hung, trailing little body, which no nourishment could plump or fortify. Her visage was habitually doleful, but contracted itself at moments into a grin of quaint drollery, which betrayed her for something of a humorist. ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... his finer product belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[355] He did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... villages in being left on one side of the main currents of commercial activity, and gradually assuming a character of repose and leisure, in many regards more attractive than the life and bustle of earlier days. Many persons are still living there who remember the humorist as a quaint and tricksy boy, alternating between laughter and preternatural gravity, and of a surprising ingenuity in devising odd practical jokes in which good nature so far prevailed that even the victims were too much amused to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... follow, a really good quartette. Then a humorist told some of his own funny stories and an elocutionist recited a bit from Shakespeare effectively. The band played a popular air and the amused audience began singing ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... portion of her own estate in the hands of trustees in order that this sentinel figure should stand guard above her in the sunshine and the rain. The idea was poetic. But Cap'n Sproul, joining the hilarious group at the graveyard fence, noted that some gruesome village humorist had seriously interfered with the poetic idea. Painted on a planed board set up against the ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Village he has revealed a living and an enlightening ideal. Here the hearts of priest and poet beat as one. There is a universal ministry, higher than divided priesthoods. Oliver Goldsmith, poet, playwright, and humorist, was a veritable minister of God. Poetry has one eternal test. The poem must ever be a very part of the very life of the poet, his very soul, the breathing hope and the vital blood of his whole being. This is true of Goldsmith's two great ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... pay a bill of fifteen dollars, and had he not met a semblance of a man on the street who was beating a lengthily under-jawed and bad-eyed bull-dog of his own, for some misdemeanor? "Yea, verily," confessed the poet-humorist, who was then a reformer. "Why didn't you have him arrested, Eugene?" "Why, well, I was going jingling along with some new verses in my heart, and I knew I'd lose the tempo if I became militant. I said, 'What'll you take for him?' The pup was ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... my brain This serious question: whether 'tis not best That one turn humorist. The mind that seeks Holiness, finds it seldom; who pursues Beauty perhaps shall in a lengthened life Find it perfected only once or twice. But if one's quest were humor—what rich stores, What tropic jungles of it, lie to hand ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... conundrum "As the natives of Mulinuu appear to be under the protection of the Imperial German naval guard belonging to the vessel under your command, I have the honour to request you to inform me whether or not they are under such protection? Amicable relations," pursued the humorist, "amicable relations exist between the government of the United States and His Imperial German Majesty's government, but we do not recognise Tamasese's government, and I am desirous of locating the responsibility for violations of American rights." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... travelled in post-chaises, miles without number. He is fond of seeing much of the world. He eats of every good dish, especially apple-pie. He drinks old hock. He has a very fine temper. He is somewhat of an humorist, and a little tinctured with pride. He has a good manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous. He has infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast. He is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young than old. His shoes are ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him under fire and heard him crack jokes with Minie balls flying uncomfortably about. Some one spoke kindly of him to old Ben Wade. "Yes, yes," said Wade; "I never did believe in ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... same objection. And remember the objection to the telephone? When Congress, in 1843, granted Morse an appropriation of $30,000 to run the first telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, one would-be humorist in that supremely intelligent body tried to introduce an amendment that part of the sum should be spent in surveying a railroad ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... sleeve. But, in a purely literary sense, this ambiguous hovering between two meanings, this oscillation between the ironical and the serious, is always amusing, and sometimes delightful. Some simple-minded people are revolted, even in literature, by the ironical method; and tell the humorist, with an air of moral disapproval, that they never know whether he is in jest or in earnest. To such matter-of-fact persons Disraeli's novels must be a standing offence; for it is his most characteristic peculiarity ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... estate thus wantonly sacrificed. For it is only fair to state, as a just tribute to the enterprise and energy of that young and thriving settlement, that there was not probably a single citizen who did not feel himself better able to control the deceased humorist's property. Some had exprest a doubt of their ability to support a family; others had felt perhaps too keenly the deep responsibility resting upon them when chosen from the panel as jurors, and had evaded their public duties; a few had declined ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... consolations, and even Dona Ignacia Arguello was less gastronomic than Father Landaeta. Rezanov, whose epicurianism had survived a year of dried fish and the coarse luxuries of his managers, suddenly saw all life in the light of the humorist, and told so many amusing versions of his adventures in the wilderness, and even of his misadventure with Japan, that the priests choked over their wine, and Langsdorff, who had not a grain of humor, swelled with pride in his ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... impassive of men, gifted with a keen though little suspected sense of humor, and no little judgment in estimating motive and character. He actually enjoyed the first call made by Miss Perkins, suggested her coming again on the morrow, and summoned his chief surgeon and his provost marshal, another keen humorist, to be present at the interview. It has been asserted that this triumvirate went so far as to encourage the lady to even wilder flights of assertion. We have her own word for it that then and there she was promised as offices three big rooms in the Palace,—the Ayuntamiento,—six ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... conquered (James Fenimore Cooper). 2. Name honored (Nathaniel Hawthorne). 3. Bright humor (Bret Harte). 4. One wholesome humorist (Oliver Wendell Holmes). 5. Really lasting stories (Robert Louis Stevenson). 6. Cheerful laborer (Charles Lamb). 7. Tender, brilliant author (Thomas Bailey Aldrich). 8. Heroism wisely lauded (Henry Wadsworth ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... impressed these different judges with the writer's surpassing capacity to handle almost all branches of inquiry and all forms of presentation. In Jersey she had shown herself an historian, in Guernsey a poetess, in Alderney a political economist, and in Sark a humorist: there were sketches of character scattered through the pages which might put our "fictionists" to the blush; the style was eloquent and racy, studded with gems of felicitous remark; and the moral ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Ex-Governor John W. Hoyt of Wyoming came to the platform and corroborated these statements, paying a fine tribute to the political influence of women. He was followed by Mrs. Lida A. Meriwether (Tenn.), whose reputation as a humorist was fully sustained in her clever portrayal of Dreams that Go by Contraries. Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt (N. Y.) gave a brilliant address on ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... beauty is in cases of the kind we have supposed sure to be elevated to the highest sphere of character and of feeling. So long as Lucian merely furnishes absurdity, as in his "Wishes," in the "Lapithae," in "Jupiter Tragoedus," etc., he is only a humorist, and gratifies us by his sportive humor; but he changes character in many passages in his "Nigrinus," his "Timon," and his "Alexander," when his satire directs its shafts against moral depravity. Thus he begins in his "Nigrinus" his picture of the degraded corruption of Rome at that time ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Leipzig in the capacity of tutor to a young German count. In his Autobiography Goethe has given a large place to Behrisch, who, as there depicted, comes before us as an accomplished man of the world, something of a roue, and a humorist in the old English sense of the word. He never appeared without his periwig, invariably wore a suit of grey, and was never seen in public without his sword, hat under arm. Of a caustic wit, of considerable literary attainments, and approaching his thirtieth year, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... with some gentlemen who were talking about the coming guild—that ancient local festival, which is so clear to the people of Preston, that they are not likely to allow it to go by wholly unhonoured, however severe the times may be. Amongst them was a gray-haired friend of mine, who is a genuine humorist. He told us many quaint anecdotes. One of them was of a man who went to inquire the price of graves in a certain cemetery. The sexton told him that they were 1 pound on this side, and 2 pounds on the other side of the knoll. "How is it that they are 2 pounds on the ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... is part of my private pleasure. Your friend here is a humorist. I laughed at his telling you to think of yourself to keep up your heart. I say, think of yourself ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... he gave this precise approximation; but Barney, who had brought the humorist in, whispered to the captain to let him have a moment's speech with the man before he was sent away. The captain nodded, and Barney ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... were, at first, greatly interested in their wonderful raiment. They fingered the fabric, smelled of it, and regarded each other intently with every mark of satisfaction and pride. Chulk, a humorist in his way, stretched forth a long and hairy arm, and grasping the hood of Taglat's burnoose pulled it down over the latter's eyes, extinguishing him, ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a violinist who would say, "If I were not a genius, I could not play so well with such little practice." The poor fellow did not know how poor a fiddler he really was. Well did Strickland Gillilan, America's great poet-humorist, say, "Egotism is the opiate that Nature administers to ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... What an indefatigable humorist is our actor? What a continuous stream of wheezes, unintelligible for the most part, of antediluvian puns, of pure nonsense at which he laughs so heartily that it is difficult not to laugh with him. ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... Anglo-Saxon school its present-day characteristic, putting upon one of the very lightest forms of art the stamp of a noble time. The point is that whilst du Maurier thus deferred to the dignity of human nature he remained a satirist, not a humorist merely, ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... educated natives. He hired a servant, as every stranger does, and was delighted when he discovered a native by the name of Satan among the numerous applicants. He engaged him instantly on his name; no other recommendation was necessary. To have a servant by the name of Satan was a privilege no humorist had ever before enjoyed, and the possibilities to his imagination were without limit. And it so happened that on the very day Satan was employed, Prince Aga Khan, the head of a Persian sect of Mohammedans, who is supposed to have a divine origin ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... interested me greatly by stating that he had been on intimate terms with that great man, MARK TWAIN, and wondered if I had ever heard the story (which he used to tell against himself) of the visitor to his house who, after a very delightful stay, during which the humorist had been at the top of his form, asked his daughter if her father was always like that? "Only when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... should have been Gammon; but in the hurry of the moment, my fault (I can only hope) passed unperceived. At the same time I caught the eye of the postmaster. He was long and lean, and brown and bilious; he had the drooping nose of the humorist, and the quick attention of a man of parts. He read my embarrassment in a glance, stepped instantly forward, sent the post-boy to the rightabout with half a word, and was back next ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sinat, in the Rue de Tournon, where the two brothers Daudet had taken up their abode. That publisher was Jules Tardieu, himself an author of some merit (under the transparent pseudonym of J. T. de St. Germain): a mild, quiet humorist of the optimistic school, a Topffer on a small ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... began to fear that the boy's too great somberness of disposition would defeat the very earnestness from which it sprang. So, one morning, the landscape-maker went to the telephone, and called for the number of a friend whom he rightly believed to be the wisest man, and the greatest humorist, in New York. The call brought no response, and the painter dried his brushes, and turned up Fifth Avenue to an apartment hotel in a cross street, where on a certain door he rapped with all the elaborate formula of a secret code. Very cautiously, the door opened, and revealed a stout man ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... and then, suddenly, I felt ashamed. I did n't want to be hiding away from my own father. I could n't stand it any longer. I bolted out, and when I found it was you I was a little flurried. But Eugenia carried it off, did n't she?" Clifford added, in the tone of a young humorist whose perception had not been permanently clouded by the sense of his ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... is a parlous state indeed, and the cause of much literary villainy. The truly great writer is more likely to write in the hope of expressing the hearts of others than his own. And there are other desires, too, most legitimate, that he may feel. An English humorist said recently in the preface to his book: "I wrote these stories to satisfy an inward craving—not for artistic expression, but for food and drink." But I cannot conscientiously advise any man to turn to writing ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... experienced when she saw the face, disgusting from its inanity. The absurdity next struck her; and with the absurdity flashed into her mind the conviction that this was not the doing of a vampire; for of all creatures under the moon, he could not be expected to be a humorist. A wild hope sprang up in her mind that Karl was not dead. Of this she soon ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... Europe. The Autobiography, Poor Richard, Father Abraham's Speech or The Way to Wealth, as well as some of the Bagatelles, are as widely known abroad as any American writings. Franklin must also be classed as the first American humorist. ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... year 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old sabre and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump. He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it; and the first time he was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have a good time. He never liked any situation ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... said about the introduction to the anecdote. A clumsy, inappropriate introduction is fatal, whereas a single apt or witty sentence will kindle interest and prepare a favorable hearing. The following extreme illustration, by the English humorist, Captain Harry Graham, well satirizes the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... remained in harbour. Or allow him on deck to take the air and such exercise as could be got there, and the moment your back was turned he was away sans conge. Few of these runaways were as considerate as that Scotch humorist, William Ramsay, who was pressed at Leith for beating an informer and there put on board the tender. Seizing the first opportunity of absconding, "Sir," he wrote to the lieutenant in command, "I am so much attached to you for the good usage I have received at your hands, that ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... ask the sheriff. He was the last one to sarve here. He sarved an attachment," replied the inevitable humorist ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... stool in Whitechapel oi'll let his lordship 'ave cheap—for five quid," suggested the humorist. ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who loved dancing and mirth and the joy of living as much as did any of the men he so courageously opposed, was not more remote from a conception of him once current in this country than was the real Cowper—the frank, genial humorist, who wrote "John Gilpin," who in his youth "giggled and made giggle" with his girl-cousins, and in his maturer years "laughed and made laugh" with Lady Austen ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... Hood. The heir to this tradition of farce, drollery and joke was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), known as "Mark Twain," born in Missouri, who raised it to an extraordinary height of success and won world-wide reputation as a great and original humorist. His works, however, include a broader compass of fiction, greater humanity and reality, and ally him to the masters of humorous creation. Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) of Georgia introduced a new variety in Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), which is literary negro folklore, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Trapper evidently relished the mirthfulness of his companion, for his face was lighted with the amused expression of the humorist when he has told to an appreciative comrade an experience against himself. But in an instant his countenance dropped, and, looking at the huge kettle that stood half buried in the coals and warm ashes in front of the glowing logs and into which Bill ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he also remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue each other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two beautiful poems, The Relic and The Funeral, addressed to the lady who had given him a ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... exclaimed the cadaverous humorist. "Ever this indigenous Pius IX—fulminating, fulminating, fulminating!—Too much inferno. The cure does half his burning for Beelzebub! We are served in a ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... be commenced a new burlesque serial, "The Mystery of Mister E. Drood," written expressly for this paper by the celebrated humorist, ORPHEUS C. KERR. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... its comedies as well as its tragedies, and the leading comedian was Thomas Corwin, a Representative from Ohio, who was a type of early Western culture and a born humorist. He was a middle-sized, somewhat stout man, with pleasing manners, a fine head, sparkling hazel eyes, and a complexion so dark that on several occasions—as he used to narrate with great glee—he was supposed to be of African descent. "There is no need of my working," said he, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... stronghold, which one must speak of in earnest as that unconscious humorist the classic American traveller is supposed invariably to speak of the Colosseum: it will be a very handsome building when it's finished. Even Perugia is going the way of all Italy—straightening out her streets, preparing her ruins, laying her venerable ghosts. The castle ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... friend is a humorist," replied Fountain, good-humoredly, "and dearly loves a paradox"; and they pooh-poohed him without ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... all the Delphic Oracle might not have been such a fool. For he knew his ignorance; but the rest were ignorant without knowing it. This was his own way of telling the story; and you can never be sure how much camouflage was in it;—and yet, too, he was a giant humorist. Anyhow, he did show men their ignorance; and you all know his solemn way of doing it. He drew them on with sly questionings to see what idiots they were; and then drew them on with more sly questionings to perceive at least a few ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... his peculiar wrong, To hear but of the oppression of the strong, Or those absurd deceits (I think with you 240 In some respects, you know) which carry through The excellent impostors of this earth When they outface detection—he had worth, Poor fellow! but a humorist in his way'— 'Alas, what drove him mad?' 'I cannot say: 245 A lady came with him from France, and when She left him and returned, he wandered then About yon lonely isles of desert sand Till he grew wild—he had no cash or land Remaining,—the police had brought him here— 250 Some ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Among them were the local celebrities in other things than war, Daniel, Bagby, Pegram, Randolph, and a half-dozen more, musicians, artists, poets, orators and wits. People were quite democratic, and Harry and Dalton were free to draw their chairs near the edge of the group and listen. Pegram, the humorist, gave them a glance of approval, when he noticed their uniforms, the deep tan of their faces, their honest eyes and their compact, ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... conceit, vain glory, and hypocrisy, is invaluable; that a good laugh can come only from a warm heart; that the man in motley is often wiser than the judge in ermine or the priest in lawn. These qualities are goodly in literature. We all love the kindly humorist from Chaucer to Holmes, inclusive. How genial and gentle they are, as they sit with us around the fireside, chucking us under the chins, and slyly poking us in the ribs; and in the field how nobly they have charged upon humbugs and shams. They have been true knights, chivalrous, ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... before he had divined the principles; and he was interested even to excitement by a type-writer, which he learned to work. When he departed he carried away with him a list of his family, with his own name printed by his own hand at the bottom. I should add that he was plainly much of a humorist, and not a little of a humbug. He told us, for instance, that he was a person of exact sobriety; such being the obligation of his high estate: the commons might be sots, but the chief could not stoop so low. And not many days after he was to be observed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which is becoming fixed, with its own grammar and declensions, etc. A curious book on it has lately been published in Trinidad by Mr. Thomas, a coloured gentleman, who seems to be at once no mean philologer and no mean humorist. The substance of the Negro's answer was, 'Why, sir, you sent me to the town to buy a packet of sugar and a packet of salt; and coming back it rained so hard, the packets burst, and the salt was all washed into the sugar. And so—I am washing it ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... shown to his future wife's relations. They are very pleasant. They try to put him at his ease. But he knows instinctively they are disappointed with him. I remember, when a very young man, attending a party at which a famous American humorist was the chief guest. I was standing close behind a lady who ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... the Philadelphia "Press," writing of one of Schuyler Colfax's receptions, says of our Washington correspondent: "Mark Twain, the delicate humorist, was present: quite a lion, as he deserves to be. Mark is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with Washington washerwomen; but the heroism of Mark is settled for ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... ouija board, Harper & Brothers manage to do very well by Mark Twain, considering that all they have to work with are the books that he wrote when he was alive. Each year we get something from the pen of the famous humorist, even though the ink has faded slightly. An introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine and a hitherto unpublished photograph as a frontspiece, and there you are—the ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... before the great war began a Dutch humorist wrote a play on German megalomania. He portrayed a German schoolroom in Prussia. Thirty or forty embryonic Prussians are at the desks and a Prussian schoolmaster ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... a novelist and a humorist. Mistral is a poet; hence, although he professes to aim at a full expression of the "soul of his Provence," there are many aspects of the Provencal nature that he has not touched upon. He has omitted all the traits that lend themselves to satirical treatment, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... comedian and humorist; well known in Scotland; has standing offer from Duke of Sutherland to ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... rejoiced considerably that night. The air was dark with flying cushions, and darker still, occasionally, when the usual humorist turned the gas out. Milton was out, for he had gone to the dinner which followed the Ripton match, and the man in command of the house in his absence was Mill. And the senior day-room had no respect whatever ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... was a French humorist and satirist, who wrote novels, plays, and short stories. He was born in Provence in southeast France, a district of which he is typical in the warmth of his imagination. He lived for a time at Lyons but later went to Paris, where he ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... or artistic conception, and its prospects of proving as attractive or remunerative as he has expected it to be. The successful business man no doubt makes his plans, as far as may be practicable, upon the system indicated by the humorist, who advises people never to prophesy unless they happen to know, but the nature of his knowledge is almost always to some extent removed from certainty. He may spend much time in laborious searching; make many inquiries from persons whom he believes to be competent to advise ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... who knew him, "is a problem and a riddle—a problem worthy of the study of those who delight in exploring that labyrinth of all that is hidden and mysterious, the human heart; and a riddle to himself and others. He is a wit and a humorist of a high order; of keen sagacity and shrewdness in many other respects than in money matters; one who can be exact to a dollar, and liberal, when he chooses, with thousands; of marked peculiarity and tenacity in his own opinions, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without doubt, foolishness. And the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... as I have said, I feel no grudge, though a certain regret that his sympathy with that deep vein of poetical imagination which underlies all our 'steaks and sirloins' should have been intercepted by this detestable lay-figure. The poetical humorist must be allowed a certain license in dealing with facts; and poor Hawthorne, in the uncongenial atmosphere of the Liverpool Custom-house, had doubtless much to suffer from a thick-skinned generation. His characteristic shyness made it a hard task for him to penetrate through ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... large blue beads; and you need but look at him to see that he is aware how becoming it is. He thinks it was given to him for good conduct, and is doing his best to merit another. The little donkey is a still more original animal. He is a practical humorist, full of perverse tricks, but all intended for effect, and without a particle of malice. He generally walks behind, running off to one side or the other to crop a mouthful of grass, but no sooner does Dervish attempt to mount him, than he sets off at full gallop, and takes the lead of ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... Humorist.' ... In Mr. Milne it may not be extravagant to descry a writer with a future before him."—Evening Standard and St. ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... author of nineteen comedies; and yet more appropriate to the robust genius of the Comic Epic was the accident that placed on the wall, beneath the window of his birth-room, a jovial jest in stone. For here some sixteenth-century humorist had displayed the arms of Abbot Beere in the form of a convivial rebus or riddle—to wit, a cross and two ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... Crossmichael, where he had gathered together, one by one, a sect of about a dozen persons, who called themselves "God's Remnant of the True Faithful," or, for short, "God's Remnant." To the profane, they were known as "Gib's Deils." Bailie Sweedie, a noted humorist in the town, vowed that the proceedings always opened to the tune of "The Deil Fly Away with the Exciseman," and that the sacrament was dispensed in the form of hot whisky-toddy; both wicked hits at the evangelist, who had been suspected of smuggling in his youth, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he was loyal to the Muse whose word he must sing whether it find listeners or not. Homer built his legendary structure to live in, not to play in; with all his sportiveness, he is a deeply earnest man; if his Zeus sometimes takes on a comic mask, it is because Providence is a humorist. Homer, when he mythologizes, is thinking, thinking as profoundly as the philosopher, and both are seeking to utter to men the same fundamental thought. The reader is to think after the poet, if not in the immediate mythical form, then in ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... began to struggle. An awful puppet, with a gibbet chain for a string. Some humorist of night must have seized the string and been playing with the mummy. It turned and leapt as if it would fain dislocate itself; the birds, frightened, flew off. It was like an explosion of all those unclean creatures. Then they returned, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... everything, but that was probably his badinage. Possibly he had one staple, and took the rest as condiment. Then what did Shakespeare live on? Bacon? And Mr. Barrie, though he has written a delightful book about his pipe and tobacco, full of suggestion to the young humorist, lets out nothing or next to nothing of his meat and drink. His hints about pipes are very extensively followed, and nowadays every ambitious young pressman smokes in public at least one well-burnt briar with an eccentric stem—even at some personal inconvenience. But ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... and persistent humorist of so good a sort that he never could help being humorous, yet there was never a sting in his jokes. Gentle raillery was the severest thing he ever attempted, and even this he did with so genial a smile and so merry an eye, that a word of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... bushel-basket of 'em already—mostly from the alleged humorist. Or else it's this sort of thing," and he tossed over an extraordinary piece of stationery—white cream-laid, with edging like a mourning band, only pink instead of ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... read many of Addison's essays, we shall discover that he is a humorist of high rank. His humor is of the kind that makes one smile, rather than laugh aloud. Our countenance relaxes when we discover that his rules for an eighteenth-century club prescribe a fine for absence except in case of sickness or ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... passed down to me. 'You see, Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'when one keeps a little house down at Wimbledon, these things have a way of dropping out as time goes on.' 'Just like the teeth,' said I. He thought over this for a while, and then laughed—oh, he laughed quite a lot—and declared I was a humorist. He hadn't heard anything so quick, not for a long while. 'Mr. Collingwood,' he said, 'I'm a lonely man with it all. I don't mind owning to you that I've taken up these here politics partly for distraction. It used to be different when me ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... under whose conduct she was exposed to the "whips and scorns," the disdain and bitter retaliation, natural to the union of a beautiful and accomplished, though vain and haughty woman, with a very eccentric, irritable, and bombastic humorist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... him a vein of genius of no ordinary kind. He died in 1635, but his poems were not published till 1647. They are of various merit, and treat of various subjects. In his 'Journey to France,' you see the humorist, who, on one occasion, when the country people were flocking to be confirmed, cried, 'Bear off there, or I'll confirm ye with my staff.' In his lines to his son Vincent, we see, notwithstanding all his foibles, the good man; and in his 'Farewell to ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... woman of nearly thirty when I first saw her; a woman spiritless and worn beyond her years," etc. This beginning not only a chapter but a book with a pronoun implying an antecedent is very bad, in the low and vulgar way of badness. It brings to mind the superhuman daily efforts of the "American humorist" of journalism to be funny; and it should be left to him and to his kind. And in the next paragraph Mrs. Edwards describes her heroine as "walking wearily along the weary street of Chesterford St. Mary." Bad style ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... disappointing to a humorist as to lead up to an interruption, and then find he is not interrupted. Mr. Chamberlain seldom fails to bring off his little unsuspected repartee, and it is his mastery of this art that make his speeches sparkle with diamond brilliancy, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Nye was whole-souled, big-hearted and genial. Those who knew him lost sight of the humorist in ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... greeted her with a word or two of respectful yet half-humorous courtesy,—a courtesy which never really offends a true woman, although it often piques her self-aplomb by the slight assumption of superiority in the humorist. A woman is quick to recognize the fact that the great and more dangerous passions are always SERIOUS, and may be excused if in self-respect she is often induced to try if there be not somewhere under the skin of this ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... Alsatian humorist of satiric bent, great learning, and little originality. His prose—especially in Gargantua, his most important work, which is an amplified and Germanized version of the first book of Rabelais—is hard to read on account of its recondite allusions, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... time to finish his thought, to mold his sentences, to brain his reader with a perfect expression of his tense emotion, then he makes literature. And when the easy-going humorist, often nowadays a column conductor, or a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, takes time to deepen his observation and to say it with real words instead of worn symbols, he makes, and does make, literature. More are doing ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... spirits and the suggestive term "scherzo" is his own invention. In music, as in literature, much hinges upon the definition of humor, and there is the same distinction in each art between wit—light and playful, and humor—broad, serious, and, at times, even grim. A genuine humorist is always a deep thinker, one who sees all sides of human nature—the great traits and the petty ones. The poet Lowell has defined humor as consisting in the contrast of two ideas, and in a Beethoven scherzo the gay ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... they did. So on they went, most of the time in gales of merriment, as some house or modest little shop suggested some character or happening in the books of the great writer and humorist. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... ashamed of you," said his three lovely daughters in concert. Huxley's ability to joke and his appreciation of the ludicrous marked him, in the mind of John Fiske, as the greatest thinker of his time. The humorist knows values, and that is why he laughs. Sensibility is, in fact, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... original article) "is probably a friend of Mr. Edison, but possibly, alas! a wicked partner. Why does he say such things as these? 'Mr. Edison claims that he realizes 90 per cent. of the power applied to this machine in external work.' . . . Perhaps the writer is a humorist, and had in his mind Colonel Sellers, etc., which he could not keep out of a serious discussion; but such jests ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... no flowers of rhetoric, no eloquent passages; he is not a wit, a humorist or a clown; yet, so great a vein of pleasantry and good nature pervades what he says, gliding over a deep current of practical argument, he keeps his hearers in a smiling good mood with their mouths open ready to swallow all he says. His ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... external show of a formal procession. Jack Folinsbee, who had at the outset played a funeral march in dumb show upon an imaginary trombone, desisted from a lack of sympathy and appreciation,—not having, perhaps, your true humorist's capacity to be content with the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... some years ago a noted humorist gave an address on the "Philosophy of Wit." He called oratory a lost art, and to prove his contention he quoted from William Jennings Bryan's famous Chicago convention speech. He said: "What would a young woman ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... stately way, Ranald had been enduring agony at the hands of Peter Ruagh sitting just behind him. Peter, whose huge, clumsy body was a fitting tabernacle for the soul within, labored under the impression that he was a humorist, and indulged a habit of ponderous joking, trying enough to most people, but to one of Ranald's temperament exasperating to a high degree. His theme was Ranald's rescue of Maimie, and the pauses of the singing he filled in with humorous comments ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... circumstances connected with it. It was a rather tedious explanation, but it filled in the time till tea arrived, when Betty busied herself among the tea-cups; her brother drew his chair close to their guest, and sat regarding him with breathless expectancy. Was this the side-splitting humorist Betty had talked so much about for months after the wedding—and then abruptly refused to ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... the gentle humorist, who died In the bright Indian Summer of his fame. A simple stone, with but a date and name, Marks his secluded resting place beside The river that he loved and glorified. Here in the Autumn of his days he came, But the dry leaves of life were all aflame ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... extraordinarily kind and simple that I wondered how on earth it was that I had really hated him at one time, for I had hated him quite honestly, and I came to the conclusion that as soon as he had ceased to be a pompous humorist he had become a very nice man. At any rate he no longer made jokes, and I never had been able to think them good ones, because those which I remembered had been nearly ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... completely his, and no man can cry halves with him, or quarters,—hardly the smallest fraction. The estimate of his genius, therefore, puts the critic to no trouble of elaborate discrimination or comparison. When we think of Hood as a humorist, there is no need that we should at the same time think of Aristophanes, or Lucian, or Rabelais, or Swift, or Sterne, or Fielding, or Dickens, or Thackeray. When we think of him as a poet,—except in a few of his early compositions,—we are not driven to examine what ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... your Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination, I was so taken with your Thoughts upon some of our English Gardens, that I cannot forbear troubling you with a Letter upon that Subject. I am one, you must know, who am looked upon as an Humorist in Gardening. I have several Acres about my House, which I call my Garden, and which a skilful Gardener would not know what to call. It is a Confusion of Kitchin and Parterre, Orchard and Flower-Garden, which ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... various character seek for themselves notoriety or a name: or desire to leave a reputation behind them, when they are no more. This is the love of posthumous fame, a subject which has afforded an extensive theme both for the philosopher and the humorist. ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... or six years we have a new humorist—at one time a Jack Downing, then a Doesticks, then again a Phoenix-Derby. Last on the list we have 'Artemus Ward,' as set forth in letters to the Cleveland Plaindealer and Vanity Fair, purporting to come from the proprietor ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... usual in the trenches.' The enemy, meanwhile, appeared to be well acquainted with our plans, for voices were heard calling out, 'Come on, Bucks, come on, Berks!' 'The Royal Berks will lead the attack,' while a humorist shouted from the fort at Gommecourt, 'Run away, English; go away home.' The enemy had indeed good reason to be confident in the strength of these positions, which twice next year were to defy capture after the most elaborate preparation. The turmoil of the last few days was now succeeded by ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... with black velvet and silver; or the peripatetic showman with his company of white rats establishes himself on the pavement opposite, till admonished to move on by the sergent de ville. What an ever-shifting panorama! What a kaleidoscope of color and character! What a study for the humorist, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... concluding that the trade might continue on the old conditions, and that each side should pay its own losses. Mr. Wade said that his language might bear the construction that the English consul, Mr. Harry Parkes, should pay all the cost himself. If Commissioner Yeh was a humorist he chose a bad time for indulging his proclivities, and, a sufficient force being available, orders were at once given to attack Canton. On December 15 Honan was occupied, and ten days were passed in bringing up the troops and the necessary stores, when, all being in readiness, an ultimatum was ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... ideal commonwealth in The Tempest, II. i. 143 ff., but it seems that he employed Florio's translation here. Rabelais's Gargantua is explicitly mentioned in As You Like It, III, ii. 238, and the great humorist is possibly the inspirer of some of Sir Andrew's nonsense in Twelfth Night, II. iii. 23. Many of the Sonnets contain reminiscences of the French sonneteers of the sixteenth century, and it is thought that in some cases Shakespeare shows direct acquaintance ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... [vionnet], or little path, as if one had beaten it out with a hammer." He was fastened by a chain four feet in length to one of the beautiful Gothic pillars of the vault, and you still see where this gentle scholar, this sweet humorist, this wise and lenient philosopher, paced to and fro those weary years like a restless beast—a captive wolf, or a bear in his pit. But his soul was never in prison. As he trod that vionnet out of the stone he meditated upon his reading, his travels, the state of the Church and ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... Oxford dislike of "the bigoted two-bottle orthodox." He records (p. 73) the characteristic mode in which on the appearance of the first symptoms of his "leaving the clientela" of Dr. Whately he was punished by that rough humorist. "Whately was considerably annoyed at me; and he took a humorous revenge, of which he had given me due notice beforehand.... He asked a set of the least intellectual men in Oxford to dinner, and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... protection, she had endeavored to make me serviceable in the warehouse; and finding I understood arithmetic tolerably well, she proposed his teaching me to keep the books; a proposition that was but indifferently received by this humorist, who might, perhaps, be fearful of being supplanted. As this failed, my whole employ, besides what engraving I had to do, was to transcribe some bills and accounts, to write several books over ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... devised for them all. Was it here that Richepin partly studied the mendicant fraternity, giving us in poetry his astounding appreciation, psychological and linguistic? And perhaps the bard of the beggars, like the English humorist, would wish his pauvres Gueux to ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... some little reputation as a humorist, but as is so often the case with those who make us laugh, his very success will prove ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... endearment has become a catchword, every caress mocks us from the hoardings. Every tender speech we make recalls to us even while we are uttering it a hundred parodies. Every possible situation has been spoilt for us in advance by the American humorist." ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... do this on an extraordinary small income. The State, as we have seen, almost takes his children off his hands from the time they are six years old. It brings them up for nothing, or next to nothing; in cases of need it partially feeds and clothes them, it even washes them. Some English humorist has said that a German need only give himself the trouble to be born; his government does the rest. But first his mother and then his wife do a good deal. They are like the woman in Proverbs who worked willingly with her hands, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... splendid humorist, Mr. Crewe. Five dollars wouldn't pay for the plate and the paper. A gentleman like you could give us twenty-five, and never know it was gone. You won't be wanting to stop in the Legislature, Mr. Crewe, and we ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the productions of that faculty which Irishmen have always been reputed, and justly reputed, to possess in peculiar measure—the faculty of humour. Compare Lever, who for a long time passed as the typical Irish humorist, with his contemporaries Thackeray and Dickens. The comparison is not fair, but it suggests the central fact that the humour of Irish literature is deficient in depth, in intellectual quality, or, to put it after an ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... to be a great journalist, and spelled hard words with great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in any of his newspaper work, ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... in some other traits of the same kind, there is assuredly any thing but that common-place indifference, which too often clouds over the evening of married life. On the contrary, it seems rather the struggle of affection with its own remorse; and, like the humorist who mourned over the extinction of his intellect so eloquently as to prove that it was still in full vigor, shows love to be still warmly alive in the very ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... trickery of the Italian masks has always found a more unfavourable reception in England than in France. The fool or clown in Shakspeare's comedies is far more of an ironical humorist than a mimical buffoon. Intrigue in real life is foreign to the Northern nations, both from the virtues and the defects of their character; they have too much openness of disposition, and too little ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... one day talked to Jerrold about the humor of a celebrated novelist, dramatist, and poet, who was certainly no humorist. ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Nothing, except the particular type of humanity and environment in which he specializes, seems to interest him. There is no hint of a general idea in his work. By some of his fellow-artists he is immensely admired. I have heard him called, seriously, the greatest humorist since Aristophanes. I admire him myself, and I will not swear that he is not the greatest humorist since Aristophanes. But I will swear that no genuine humorist ever resembled Aristophanes less than Mr. Jacobs does. Aristophanes was passionately interested in everything. He would leave nothing ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... intangible quirk. No type has the sensitiveness essential to this in any such degree as the Thoracic. Individuals of other types sometimes possess a keen sense of humor. This trait is not confined to the Thoracic. But it is a significant fact that almost every humorist of note has had this type as the first or ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... "clique." At first they amused themselves by casting humorously defiant eyes at the long low Ditch Reservoir, which peeped over the green wall of the ridge, six hundred feet above them; at times they even simulated an exaggerated terror of it, and one recognized humorist declaimed a grotesque appeal to its forbearance, with delightful local allusions. Others pretended to discover near a woodman's hut, among the belt of pines at the top of the descending trail, the peeping figure of ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... a journal an extract about Lycurgus, Butler proceeds: "Yet this truly comic paper does not probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac knows that he steals, or than John Milton knew that he was a humorist when he wrote a hymn upon the Circumcision and spent his honeymoon in composing a ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... Swan was a celebrated low humorist and punster who frequented Will's Coffee-house when it was the fashionable resort of men of wit ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... perhaps, to my wiser readers, who may not have that foolish fondness for odd and obsolete things to which I am a little given, were I to mention the other makeshifts or this worthy old humorist, by which he was endeavoring to follow up, though at humble distance, the quaint customs of antiquity. I was pleased, however, to see the respect shown to his whims by his children and relatives; who, indeed, entered readily into ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Darjeeling. What a godsend this cool hill-station is to Calcutta, for in twenty hours the par-boiled Europeans by the Hooghly can find themselves in a temperature like that of an English April. At Silliguri, where the East Bengal Railway ends, some humorist has erected, close to the station, a sign-post inscribed "To Lhassa 359 miles." The sign-post has omitted to state that this entails an ascent of 16,500 feet. The Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway, an intrepid little mountain-climber, looks as though ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... ever I knew in my life. He is also to appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in it." "He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to Calais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all my life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of our concord is that neither he nor I are ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... American who once, in my hearing, burst out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my interlocutor often saw Mr. B——. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we never see him: he lives away off in the West." It was the western part of his county our friend meant, and my American humorist found matter for infinite jest in his meaning. "I should as soon think," he declared, "of saying my western hand and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... are in our reserve billets, and not sorry either. The enemy threw a shell in beside us this morning as I was getting up, to show that he had not forgotten us! It must have come 5 miles at least. He is a humorist, too, of a grim sort, for 3 days ago he bombarded the little town (French) of Estaires with French shells. I suppose some gun he had captured from them. Anyhow, his ammunition is certainly, as a rule, not as good as the stuff he was using. Have a headache ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... paid the town humorist no attention. He hurried to the counter and leaned across it, asking his ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... Seumas O'Brien. At first one is struck with their utter absence of form, and then one realizes that this is a conscious art that wanders truant over life and imagination. In Seumas O'Brien I believe that America has found a new humorist of popular sympathies, a rare observer and philosopher whose very absurdities have a persuasive philosophy ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was at one of my entertainments at Leicester," said the humorist-caricaturist looking across at me with twinkling eyes. "A terrible hissing! I showed Mr. Gladstone on the sheet. Immediately it burst forth like a suddenly alarmed steam-engine. The audience rose in indignation—they tried to outdo it with frantic applause, but in spite of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... be a disharmony between the pose and the inner values or an attempt to win superiority or "difference" of a superior kind by acting. In either case it excites ridicule, hatred or disgust, and shafts at it form part of the stock in trade of the satirist, humorist and indeed every portrayer of life. What men demand of each other is sincerity, and even where the insincerity is merely a habitual pose it arouses hostile feeling which expresses itself all the way from criticism to the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Wuthering Heights was popular because it was little more than a brilliant presentation of the love passion, so Many Cargoes and Light Freights are popular as well as excellent because they aim at nothing but the broad effect of laughter. Mr. Jacobs is inferior to Dickens because he is a humorist and nothing more, and also because he has an infinitely narrower range. His art is one which presents but a single aspect of life, and suggests no ambition to exhibit a large grasp upon life as a whole. But he succeeded exactly in what he set out ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... good-natured, cultivated, and well-bred man of no particular force or character or strength of emotion. He has not the least intention of taking Sensibility seriously, but it is the proper thing to take it somehow or other. So he sets himself to work to be a man of feeling and a humorist at the same time. His encounter with the leper is so freshly and simply told, there is such an air of genuineness about it, that it seems at first sight not merely harsh, but unappreciative, to compare it to Sterne's account of his proceedings with ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... The murderous humorist whose cynical inspiration gives life to these deadly lines is at first sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts may perhaps seem no less possible a character than Flamineo. Pure and simple ambition of the Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into infamy ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Spencer, who take all knowledge, or large fields of it, to be their province. The author of "Thoughts on the Universe" has something in common with these, but he appears also to have a good deal about him of what we call the humorist; that is, an individual with a somewhat heterogeneous personality, in which various distinctly human elements are mixed together, so as to form a kind of coherent and sometimes pleasing whole, which is to a symmetrical character as a breccia is ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... They give such an inside picture of savage life, with its nastiness, its alternate gluttony and starving, and its ferocity, as it would be hard to find elsewhere, drawn in such English as the wildest humorist would not ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... satire was a tender episode or any symptom connected with the dawn of love. Florence herself had suffered at intervals throughout her eleventh summer because Wallie discovered that Georgie Beck had sent her a valentine; and the humorist's many, many squealings of that valentine's affectionate quatrain finally left her unable to decide which she hated the more, Wallie or Georgie. That was the worst of Wallie: he never "let up"; and in Florence's circle there was no more sobering threat than, "I'll tell Wallie Torbin!" ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... unseemly hour the next morning Mercutio was roused from his slumbers by Hamlet, who counted every minute a hundred years until he saw Juliet. Mercutio did not take this interruption too patiently, for the honest humorist was very serious as a sleeper; but his equilibrium was quickly restored ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... worthy of being read for their own sakes, I would assign a prominent place to the present volume. Much of the story element in it is admirable, and, further, it shows M. Zola as a genuine satirist and humorist. The Rougons' yellow drawing-room and its habitues, and many of the scenes between Pierre Rougon and his wife Felicite, are worthy of the pen of Douglas Jerrold. The whole account, indeed, of the town of Plassans, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... master-humorist, reversed positions between Heths and Vivians. The old Arraigner, for his part, seemed to feel now that, to all intents and purposes, papa had put up the building ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of Tonia Round The Circle The Rubber Plant's Story Out of Nazareth Confessions of a Humorist The Sparrows in Madison Square Hearts and Hands The Cactus The Detective Detector The Dog and the Playlet A Little Talk About Mobs ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... has given the same light and color of home to his prose, while imparting to his productions in both kinds a delightful tinge of the foreign and remote. In addition to his capacities as a poet and a romancer, he is a wit and humorist of sparkling quality. In reading his books one seems also to inhale the perfumes of Arabia and the farther East, blended with the salt sea-breeze and the pine-scented air of his native State, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... said with a laugh, 'I call that good; I call that distinctly good. I had no idea old Hawk was such a humorist! His reputation indeed; well, that beats me! All that Hawk wants is another suit on his hands. I wish you would let me keep this letter. I will have some fun with my ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... smoke a pipe with me in my garden. The twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world from different points of view, and I am now and again made witness of a good-humoured passage of arms. The clergyman is old, unmarried, and a humorist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provoke laughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles. Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its death-beds, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... she said, "but even his most enthusiastic partisans could hardly characterise him as a humorist." ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... coarsely—their foul voices went through me. They stamped, spat, pulled the things about, nothing escaped them. One of them held up the Japanese dressing-gown and made some horrible jokes; and the auctioneer, who was a humorist, answered, "If there are any ladies' men present, we shall have some spirited bidding." The pastel I bought, and I shall keep it and try to find some excuse to satisfy my husband, but I send you the miniature, and I hope you will not let it be sold again. There were many other things I should have ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,—copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals; ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells |
