"Ribald" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Jeff was getting right into the spirit of this bohemian night life; you could tell that. Lon Price also. In ten minutes Lon had made the acquaintance of a New York social leader at the next table and was dancing with her in an ardent or ribald manner before Ben ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of them, "we are well punished this time; but at any rate it is better that the trick should only be known to us than to us and our wives, for there would be much danger if it came to their knowledge. You hear by their confession that these ribald monks have done marvels—both more and better than we could do. And, if our wives knew that, they would not be satisfied with this experience only. My advice is that we swallow ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... of 1746, full of vulgar triumph, reproduces a "Temple Bar, the City Golgotha," representing the Bar with three heads on the top of it, spiked on long iron rods. The devil looks down in ribald triumph from above, and waves a rebel banner, on which, besides three coffins and a crown, is the motto, "A crown or a grave." Underneath are written ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... flinging out an arm to drag forward her son. "Is he to waste his youth here in softness and idleness? But yesternight that ribald mocked him with his lack of scars. Shall he take scars in the orchard of the Kasbah here? Is he to be content with those that come from the scratch of a bramble, or is he to learn to be a fighter and leader of the Children of ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... it is; no confusion, no distraught men, no human voice raised except in ribald song. From the ends of the earth have come all these men, all these munitions, all this food and tents and iron and steel and rubber and gas and oil. And there it centers for the hour of its need on this one small sector of the front; indeed on every small sector of the long, long trail, these ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... his passion for everything English, had advised him to go as an Ancient Briton, with a coat of blue paint. Scorning such ribald chaff, he had ordered a magnificent costume of chain armour. Greatly to his satisfaction he had persuaded Hereford Vaughan to go as Shakespeare, Valentia and Daphne respectively as Portia in scarlet and Rosalind ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... like such jesting,' said I. 'The dead are very dead and will not disturb anybody, but even the prejudices of respectable persons ought to be respected. A ribald like Jacques counts for nothing, but I did not expect ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... gangway, when it became apparent that those in charge of her were so helplessly drunk that they could hardly stand. Yet, somehow, they managed, with assistance, to clamber up our low side and reach the deck; when, as well as their drunken state would allow, they forthwith proceeded, in ribald language, to entertain their more sober shipmates with a tale of gross, wanton, cruel outrage, perpetrated on board the Spaniard, that made my blood boil with indignation, and caused me, thick-skinned sailor ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... but don't talk to me in that ribald tone, Mark; I have enough to bear as it is. Once for all I ask you, Is it true what my brother tells me, that you have returned to the mire like the sow in the Scriptures; that you are going to let your name be connected with—with a novel, ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... American camp, made to warn her lover of another attempt on the life of Washington, who must pass her father's house on his return from a distant settlement. The Tory knows nothing of this; but he starts whenever the men in the next room rattle the dice or break into a ribald song, and a frown of apprehension crosses his face as the foragers crunch by, half-barefoot, through the snow. The hours go on, and the noise in the next room increases; but it hushes suddenly when a knock at the door is heard. The Tory opens it, and trembles as a tall, grave man, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... —from ribald lips and throats turned brazen with laughter, from singers who toss their hats aloft and roll in their seats; the chorus swells to the accompaniment ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... into ribald laughter. A certain sudden thought which had cut into him like a knife thrust into ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... instil the poison they suck, first into the courts of princes, acquainting them with the choicest delights, and criticisms of sin. As perhaps did that Petronius whom Nero called his Arbiter, the master of his revels; and the notorious ribald of Arezzo,[84] dreaded and yet dear to the Italian courtiers. I name not him for posterity's sake, whom Henry VIII named in merriment his vicar of hell. By which compendious way all the contagion that foreign books can infuse will find ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the ear of Ernest. Meantime joke followed jest, among Polydore and the rest of the gay youths, in riotous and ribald succession, which, however characteristic of the rude speakers, may as well be omitted here. Their effect was to shake in some degree the fortitude of the Saxon maiden, who had some difficulty in mustering courage to address them. "As you have mothers, gentlemen," she said, "as you have ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... The horsemen of the army followed, and then the legions, every spear wreathed, every head crowned with bay, so that an evergreen grove might have seemed marching through the Roman streets, but for the war songs, and the wild jests, and ribald ballads that custom allowed the soldiers to shout out, often in pretended mockery of their own victorious ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... plays, though none are free from it, which most abound in this ribald fun—for fun it always is, never mere pruriency for its own sake, Aristophanes has a deal of the old 'esprit gaulois' about him—are the 'Peace' and, as might be expected from its theme, lending itself so readily to suggestive ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the part of her brother. This greatly offended many of the highest nobility of the realm. It became a family quarrel of great bitterness. A thousand tongues were busy whispering malicious accusations against Maria. Ribald songs to sully her name were hawked through the streets. Care began to press heavily upon the brow of the dauphiness, and sorrow to spread its pallor over her cheek. Her high spirit could not brook ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... got both my shoulders to the shuck mattress I hears a houseful of unbecoming and ribald noises like a youngster screeching with green-apple colic. I opens my door and calls out in the hall for the widow lady, and when she sticks her head out, I says: 'Mrs. Peevy, ma'am, would you mind choking off that kid of yours so that honest ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... out of his nether garments, cursing bitterly as the wind caught his bare legs, and hung suspended between earth and water, amid ribald comments from above. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... were on deck—to get anywhere where they were not. Still, so persistent are depraved human beings under the influence of Satan, in showing their enmity to those who love God, and to God Himself, that they often followed him with their ribald shouts, and kept him forcibly ...
— The History of Little Peter, the Ship Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... happily, this was not the case. The only people in the carriages were some young blackguards, dressed up in extraordinary garments, dressing-gowns and cotton caps, and I know not what other masquerading trash, intended to call forth the ribald jokes of the multitude. It was a disgusting scene. The days passed on, and by degrees Paris returned to its ordinary life. The streets were repaired, vehicles began to circulate again. Soldiers, gendarmes, policemen, were to be seen once more, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... in the character of a prisoner, was the signal for a great yell of ferocious delight on the part of the outlaws, immediately followed by a brisk fusillade of scurrilous, ribald jests concerning the sport that they would have with me upon their return to their mountain stronghold; and so bloodcurdling were the suggestions thrown out by some of those fiends that I confess a qualm of fear surged over me for a second or two; for I saw at once that, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... cessation of their jaw-bones' activity, they serve up the most ribald of raillery. They knock each other about, and clamor in riotous rivalry to have their say. One sees even Farfadet smiling, the frail municipal clerk who in the early days kept himself so decent and clean amongst us all that he was taken for a foreigner ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... as worse rascals than mountebanks, Callias the town-slave and the like of him, antic-jesters, [Footnote: [Greek: Mimous geloion], players of drolls, mimes, or farces. Our ancient word droll signifies, like [Greek: mimos], both the actor and the thing acted.] and composers of ribald songs to lampoon their companions, such persons Philip caresses and keeps about him. Small matters these may be thought, Athenians, but to the wise they are strong indications of his character and wrong-headedness. Success perhaps throws a ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... thee! in that last hour, When thy bruis'd breast shall heave beneath the chains That link thee to the stake; when o'er thy form, Exposed unmantled, the brute multitude Shall gaze, and thou shalt hear the ribald taunt, More painful than the circling flames that scorch Each quivering member; wilt thou not in vain Then wish my friendly aid? then wish thine ear Had drank my words of comfort? that thy hand Had grasp'd the dagger, and in death preserved Insulted modesty?" Her glowing cheek Blush'd crimson; ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... pet sheep grown ribald and reckless were to confront Marcus and Faustina. They had both been betrothed to others, years before, and this they now resented. They talked of this much, and then suddenly ceased to talk of it, and each evaded mentioning it, and pretended they never thought of it. Then they explosively ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... glass, to settle their yearly reckoning at the smith's. At noon there was a big dinner at the inn. They ate much and drank more; and, from afternoon till late in the evening, the smiths' men and the peasants loafed along the streets and sang ribald songs. The steadiest of them walked about talking, from one tavern to the other. They were nearly all drunk. She sat peeping at it from behind her curtain and was vexed at all this wantonness and rather glad that she had not yet seen "him" ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... than as a friend; but the negligence, the coldness of Trevor, the overpowering mastery of my own passions, drove me one day past the line, and I wrote that which I dared not utter. It never entered into my mind for an instant to insult such a woman with the commonplace sophistry of a ribald. No! I loved her with all my spirit's strength. I would have sacrificed all my views in life, my ambition, my family, my fortune, my country, to have gained her; and I told her this in terms of respectful adoration. I worshipped the ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he wrote like an apostle—sometimes like a raving ribald. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... correct in your statement, that this charming young person, who day after day parades the streets with a barrel-organ and a monkey,—the last unhappily indisposed at present,—listening to the degrading jokes of ribald boys and depraved men,—you are quite correct, Sir, in stating that she is not my daughter. On the contrary, she is the daughter of an Hungarian nobleman who had the misfortune to incur my displeasure. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... murmured, for by those words, wittingly or unwittingly, their general had confessed his faith, and that day they made ribald songs about him in the camp. But on the morrow when they learned how that the man whom the prince spared had been seized by a lion and taken away as he sat at night with his companions in the bivouac, ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... this sweet clay, That even from her picture breathes perfume, Was carried on a fiery wind away, Or foully locked in the worm-whispering tomb; This casket rifled, ribald fingers thrust 'Mid all her dainty ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... edges browned by age—a reprint of a letter largely circulated at the time, addressed by Dickens to The Times, dated "Devonshire Terrace, 13th Novr., 1849," in which he describes, in graphic and powerful language, the ribald and disgusting scenes which he witnessed at Horsemonger Lane Gaol on the occasion of the execution of the Mannings. The letter is too long to quote in its entirety, but the following extract will suffice:—"I have seen habitually some of the worst sources of ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... she did," he answered, "but think you that the ribald jests of mortal men can touch one of the angels of God? She stood for a moment framed in the doorway, and I tell you I lie not when I declare that it seemed to all present as though a halo of pure white light encircled her. Where the light came from ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... will the ribald line Which tells his lapse from duty, How kissed the maddening lips of wine Or wanton ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... smile or to yawn. As for the villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, with her witless sentimentalism, we find it hard to take them seriously; they do not produce a good illusion. And then the whole style of the piece, the violent and ribald language, the savage action, the rant and swagger, the shooting and stabbing,—all this seems at first calculated for the entertainment of young savages, and moves one to approve the oft-quoted mot of the German prince who ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... forty counties had pictured to themselves this osculation of intellects, and shrugged their shoulders, and decided once more that men were incomprehensible. These great ones in London, falling in love like the rest! But no! Love was a ribald and voluptuous word to use in such a matter as this. It was generally felt that the Reverend Archibald Jones and Miss Chetwynd the elder would lift marriage to what would now be ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... mysteries to him connected with that sight; and then vehemently denounced the false and foolish teachers that quit the authority of the Bible for speculations of their own, and degrade the preaching of the gospel with ribald jests, and legends of Saint Anthony and ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... other hand, no student of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely and precociously familiar the big stalwart Westminster boy, Camden's favoured and grateful pupil, must have made himself with the rankest haunts and most unsavoury recesses of that ribald waterside and Smithfield life which he lived to reproduce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable fidelity to details from which Hogarth might have shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in classic ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the old man that he was laid in Alloway Kirkyard before these things befell. But the widowed mother had to bear the burden, and to receive in her home and bring up the child that should not have been born. When silence and shame would have most become him, Burns poured forth his feelings in ribald verses, and bitterly satirized the parish minister, who required him to undergo that public penance which the discipline of the Church at that time exacted. Whether this was a wise discipline or not, no blame ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... thought at all of the cripple next door he would like her to think of him in a kindly way, as a decent sort of hulk, so to speak. It was provoking to feel that she would next hear of him as a dissipated ruffian, friend and defender of another ruffian who howled ribald songs in the presence—or at ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... had wakened to the fact of the presence of a "toff" in its midst. His light topcoat and silk hat-rendered him as conspicuous as a red Indian in war-paint would have been on Rotten Row. A cry of surprise was raised, and drowned in a volley of ribald ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... they bore themselves in the matrimonial dispute, and what were the subjects usually spoken of in the intimacies of family life. But from these people he received the smallest assistance.—Some were ribald, some jocose, some so darkly explanatory that intelligence could not peer through the mist or could only divine that these hated their wives. One man held that all domestic matters should be left entirely to ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... in every bone. Bullets are fearful tenants, but fevers are worse. And some of the flushed, staggering folk, that reeled along the roadside, were literally out of their minds. They muttered and talked incoherently, and shouted ribald songs till my blood curdled to see them. At the first house on the right of the road, a half-mile past the Creek, I noticed many idle soldiers climbing the white palings, to watch something that lay in the yard. A gray-haired ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... it now, if you please. What is this? How does he dare send his ribald jokes to me in such a matter? No, I do not suppose I ever shall like Dr. Proudie; I have never expected it. A matter of conscience with him! Well—well, well. Had I not read it myself, I could not have believed it of him. I would not positively ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... disorder amidst those desperate men; and even the captain himself, perceiving that they could laugh, and shout, and sing, in the delirium of intoxication, rushed from the side of Wagner and joined the rest. It was dreadful to hear the obscene jest, the ribald song, and the reckless execration, sent forth from the cabin, as if in answer to the awful voices in which Nature was then speaking to the world. But scarcely had a faint gleam appeared in the orient sky—not quite a gleam, but a mitigation of the intenseness of the night—when ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... white horse into the cut. As they approached the shanties, a woman's voice was heard, raised in ribald song. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... in his favour was a discovery made at the spot where the body was found. Some profane and ribald words, also in French, had been scrawled in chalk on the door and doorsill, being in the nature of a coarse defiance to the police to find the assassin, and experts in handwriting who were called testified unanimously that Burwell, who wrote ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... was a very different thing. He said it was simply but another proof of the guilt of the accused, that he should compare himself with the apostles and the martyrs; and these worshipful Christian magistrates with heathen magistrates and judges. Hearing him talk in this ribald way, he could no longer doubt the accusation brought against him; for there was no surer proof of a man or woman having dealings with Satan, than to defame and ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... marauders, humbly imploring for the blood and offal of their own cattle which had been slaughtered for the soldiers' food! Such is the avowal which historical justice demands. But let me turn from further details of these painful and irritating scenes, or of the ribald frolics and revelry with which they were intermingled—races of naked women on horseback for the amusement of ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... verses, anonymous letters, cold looks from former friends, hot taunts from casual acquaintances? For art had been attacked in the very home and haunt of art! The town had been knifed under the ribs by one of her own sons!—made ridiculous in the eyes of the ribald East, and dubious in the regard ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... ripened scholar who wastes his effort," was the dry comment. "Most of the lads of the town are coarse louts who pattern after their ribald elders, Jack. They will lead ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... the expense of their more fortunate, and probably—I may say certainly—more meritorious countrymen. I do not indeed go so far as to say that this woman is in collusion with those ferocious ruffians who have made these sacred precincts of justice ring with their ribald and threatening scoff's. But the persistence of these riotous interruptions, and the ease with which their perpetrators have evaded arrest, have produced a strange impression in my mind. (Very impressively.) However, ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... remember well once, when I was second officer of a large passenger ship, going in the forecastle as she lay at anchor at St. Helena, to see a sick man. Half the crew were drunk, and the beastly kennel in which they lived was in a thick fog of tobacco-smoke and the stale stench of rum. Ribald songs, quarrelling, and blasphemy made a veritable pandemonium of the place. I passed quietly through it to the sick man's bunk, and found him—dead! He had passed away in the midst of that, but the horror of it did not seem to impress his ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... lover foul, * Sighs rend his bosom and bespeak his soul By charms of thee and whitest cheek I swear thee, * Pity a heart for love lost all control Bend to him, be his stay 'gainst stress of love, * Nor aught accept what saith the ribald fool.'" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... a denser throng was gathered around jugglers, tumblers, wrestlers that writhed over the road-way, actors who danced Etruscan pantomimes and carried their make-up in little bags slung around their necks, singers of medleys, and would-be popular poets who spouted coarse epigrams and ribald satires levelled at the thieving, the effeminate, the adulterous patricians who thought to rule Rome and had named an Aemilius Paullus to stand beside and check the generous, the fearless, the incorruptible Varro. ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... brightened as he spoke. Now and then the priests with the other prisoners cast suspicious glances towards him; but he continued to walk on, speaking so low that no one else but the unhappy lady could hear him; and thus the band of prisoners arrived at Smithfield. Here they were saluted by the ribald shouts of the populace, who seemed to delight in hurling all sorts of abusive epithets on their heads. A'Dale wanted to remain, but I kept to my purpose. My chief interest was with the unhappy lady. I rejoiced, ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... who put me in a passion May find me pipe to another fashion," "How?" cried the Mayor, "d'ye think I'll brook Being worse treated than a crook? Insulted by a lazy ribald With idle pipe and vesture piebald? You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst, Blow your pipe there till you burst!" Once more he stept into the street: And to his lips again Laid his long pipe of smooth straight ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... characteristic of Moliere is that he does not exaggerate; his fools are never overwitty, his buffoons too grotesque, his men of wit too anxious to display their smartness, nor his fine gentlemen too fond of immodest and ribald talk. His satire is always kept within bounds, his repartees are never out of place, his plots are but seldom intricate, and the moral of his plays is not obtruded, but follows as a natural consequence of the whole. He rarely rises to those lofty realms of poetry where ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... sentimental situation, but once or twice I longed to turn the whole equipage into the woods—or the ditch. As, for instance, when three pine-woods cavalrymen had no sooner got by us than they set up that ribald old camp-song, ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... name that appears the following instant is that of Henry Hide, the head of the leather Trust. The ribald jest of the boy proves ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... epistle I replied by telegraph to the effect that I should as soon think of making inquiries about the character of an archangel, or that of one of his High Church saints. This telegram, he told me afterwards, he considered unseemly and even ribald, especially as it had given great offence to the postmaster, who was one of the ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... also the somewhat ribald mirth which has clung for centuries about Saint Peter as gatekeeper of Heaven. We can trace this mirth back to the rude jests of the earliest miracle plays. We see these jests repeated over and over again in the folklore of Latin and ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... attended this gruesome service, but it was generally accompanied by ribald jokes, at the expense of the poor "Johnny" they were "planting." This was not the fruit of debased natures or degenerate hearts on the part of the boys, who well knew it might be their turn next, under the fortunes of war, to be buried in like manner, but it was recklessness ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... prankt out in men's attire, and your steel corselets cover the faintest hearts that ever failed for dastard fear! Shut fast the palace-gates! ... close every barrier! ... search every court and corner, lest haply this base false Prophet be still here in hiding,—he that blasphemed with ribald tongue the High Priestess of our Faith, the holy Virgin Lysia! ... Are ye all turned renegades and traitors that ye will suffer him to go free and triumph in his lawless heresy? Ye shameless knaves! Ye milk-veined rascals! ... What abject ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... bestowed unusual care. The ill fa'urd, fearsome couple—Sir Robert with his face "gash and ghastly as Satan's," and "Major Weir," the jackanape, in his red-laced coat and wig—Steenie's eerie encounter with the "stranger" on horseback, the ribald crew of feasters in the hall are described so faithfully and in such vivid phrases that it is no wonder Willie should remark at one point of the story: "I almost think I was there mysell, though I couldna be born at the same time." The ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... gay and sparkling beauty, of her kisses and caresses, and the delightful coolness of her thin and supple hands. His mad infatuation for her made him oblivious to the taunts and jeers of the villagers, who seldom saw him without making ribald allusion to ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... in his day, And we, in ours, who, sorely-pressed, would stay The rising tide of Revolution, check Disintegration, of the claws who'd peck At our political sleeves and platform hearts Must not be frightened. "Rummiest of starts," The ribald Cockney cries; to see at length, "The Tory seeking to recruit his strength Prom those he dubbed, in earlier, scornfuller mood The crowing hens, the shrieking sisterhood!" Shade of sardonic SMOLLETT, haunt ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... prophetic insight. He had touched the man vitally enough at last, and it was through the boy. He had murdered Bill Fletcher, and he had done it through the only thing Bill Fletcher had ever loved. From this he returned again to the memory of the deliberate purpose of that day—to the ribald jests, the coarse profanities, the brutal oaths. Then to the night when he had forced the first drink down Will's throat, and so on through the five years of his revenge to the present moment. Well, his triumph ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... centre of the Carnival—where the stake had been set up, a great crowd fought for coigns of vantage—a joyous, good-humored tussle. The great fountain sent its flashing silver spirts towards a blue heaven. As the death-cart lumbered into the Piazza ribald songs from the rabble saluted the criminal's ears, and his wild, despairing eyes lighted on many a merry face that but a few hours before had followed him to testify to righteousness; and, mixed with theirs, the faces of his fellow-Jews, sinister with malicious ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to account for a world of unutterable strangeness they had invented a God far too cheaply simple. His mood was certainly not one of ribald easy scoff. It was they (he assured himself) whose theology was essentially cynical; not he. He was a little weary of this just, charitable, consoling, hebdomadal God; this God who might be sufficiently honoured by a decorously memorized ritual. Yet was he too shallow? Was ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... kicked with force. She booted the terrible brute round the cage. She seemed to glory in her triumph, and when Mahdi butted into a corner and refused to stir, she took him by one leg, and towed him twice round the cage, and the tittering the crowd swelled to yells of derisions and ribald laughter, while Professor Thunder pranced about and cursed furiously. To save his show from being ruined with ridicule, he rushed in, seized the woman, and bundled her ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... of the City, lectured refractory apprentices like a father, and tamed down to an ordinary man of the world, still shameless, ribald, irreligious, but, as Gibbon says, "a good companion with inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humour, and a great deal of knowledge." He quietly took his seat for Middlesex in 1782, and eight years afterwards the resolutions ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... again, but it was not the soft music such as a lover demands if he is to give of his best. It was a brassy, clashy rendering of a ribald one-step, enough to choke the eloquence of the most ardent. Couples were dipping and swaying and bumping into one another as far as the eye could reach; while just behind him two waiters had halted in order to thrash ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... but Don Rodrigue, with a band of ribald followers, succeeds in carrying her off with all the other nuns. They are all driven by the King's soldiers into the cemetery of the Aliscamps. Nerto wanders away during the battle and is lost among ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... ribald!" quoth the Miller, "hast? A traitor false, false lying clerk!" quoth he, "Thou shalt be slain by heaven's dignity, Who rudely dar'st disparage with foul lie My daughter that is come of lineage high!" And by the throat he Allen grasped amain; And caught ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... accustomed to assemble, rank and office were forgotten, etiquette laid aside, and abandon ruled the hour. Votaries of Venus and of Bacchus were all of them, however disguised; and, secure in that close conclave, where no pure female presence was found to check the bacchanalian song, or forbid the ribald jest, all sat to listen to and applaud their host's inimitable stories, his grotesque descriptions, his wayward thoughts and fantastic images; to hearken to his close analysis, his robust reasoning, his wondrous pathos, his sublime exaggeration; ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... town founded on excitement. Counting its numerous shootings and consequent lynchings, and proportioning them to its population, White Lodge had experienced more thrills than the largest of Eastern cities. Some ribald verse-writer, seizing upon White Lodge's weakness as a ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... trap with lying words had kissed another. He seemed to hear the Alexandrians laughing at the forsaken bridegroom, to see them pointing the finger of derision at the man whom cunning woman had deceived even before marriage. What a feast for their ribald wit! ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... jokes worn threadbare. A similar kind of fun, with local differences, prevails in the States, but is wonderfully mixed up with scriptural and religious jokes. To us sober Britons, whatever our opinions, these latter japes appear more or less ribald, though they ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... "What a ribald boy! Now, listen, Ted; be very attentive, and I will tell you a true, true story. You mustn't laugh the tiniest titter—ah, now, Ted! you won't ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... all in some far-off way, but I was not touched by the spirit of it, was not a part of it. I watched the reddened cheeks and loose scorching mouths around me with a sort of distant curiosity, and the ribald jests flung right and left struck me not at all acutely. It was as if I were reading a Book of Bacchus. I drank on evenly, not doggedly, and answered jest for jest without a hot breath of drunkenness. I looked ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is, the poets are the only people who score by the present arrangement; which it is therefore their interest to maintain. While we are doing all the work, these incorrigible skulkers lounge about and make ribald remarks; they write Greek tragedies on Fate, on the sublimity of Suffering, on the Petty Span, and so on; and act in a generally offensive way. And we are even weak enough to buy their books; offer them drinks, peerages, and things; and say what superlative fellows they are! But when the long-looked-for ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... British chamber of horrors. Nor would death itself have shielded their reputations from hatchments of dishonour. For the greatest of Englishmen reviled even the sacred name of Joan of Arc, the stainless Maid of France, to belittle a fallen foe and spice a ribald stage-play. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Rathbawne Mills. Meetings became more frequent and more turbulent; drinking and disorder were observably on the increase; and at the end of another four weeks one of the gates of the mills was beaten down, and several hundred men and boys paraded around shop after shop, breaking windows and singing ribald songs. It was not a very serious demonstration in itself. Its ominous feature lay in the fact that the police made no attempt to check it. There was something else about it, to the thinking of McGrath. It was not so much that events were moving ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... ribald clown. And check with an indignant frown The scurrilous backbiter; But speed good-humour as it runs, Be even tolerant of puns, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... demand, in this private and delicate matter, the sympathy of the whole nation; and yet—such is the world—there were those who actually treated the relations between their Sovereign and her servant as a theme for ribald jests. ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... all the little world about him. I have known him as a farmer, and seen him sitting at the head of his table in the farm kitchen, with his sons and daughters and men-servants and women-servants about him, and, save for ribald gossip, no one of whatever condition abridged the flow of talk for his presence. I have known him as a parson, when he has been the father of his parish, the patriarch of his people, the "ould angel" of ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... Sally, "to tell how you and Saunders—that's your new bailiff's name, is it not?—cooked up this woman's race between you as a step towards saving the Empire. The language is ribald in places, I allow; but I shouldn't greatly wonder if that, more or less, is how it happened. And any way I've come to the rescue, and kept the Imperial Ham in ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not so wise as she was. They resented his escapades, blushed at his ribald songs and coarse jokes, by turns threatening and admonishing him. And although their brother-in-law was on the whole rather good-natured, he sometimes got into a rage and had words with them. Then Karin's only thought was how she should get her sisters away from the house, that they might escape ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... planned to preserve his mummy throughout the ages, fell in and is the only one of the tombs of the kings that cannot be shown. The mummy of this ablest and proudest of the Pharaohs is now on exhibition at the Cairo Museum with a score of others and excites the ribald comment of the Cook's tourist, who drops his "h's" and knows nothing of Egyptology. Yet the mummy of Rameses is by far the most interesting of those shown at the museum because the head and face are so essentially modern. The other rulers of Egypt were plainly Orientals, ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... call "Glacidas"—commanded the English post at the Tourelles, and he and another English officer replied by bidding her go home and keep her cows, and by ribald jests that brought tears of shame and indignation into her eyes. But, though the English leaders vaunted aloud, the effect produced on their army by Jeanne's presence in Orleans was proved four days after her arrival, when, on ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to scorn by them all of being chased by US troops at the very commencement of his enterprise; of being severely wounded, rescued, and carried off during the flight by Buck Tom, and then—a long blank, mingled with awful dreams and scenes, and ribald songs, and curses—some of all which was real, and some the working ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... along arm in arm, exchanging ribald jests with each other, and insulting the inoffensive passers by with coarse remarks interlarded with oaths, and, whenever occasion offered, tripping them up with their swords or canes and landing them in ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... with open mouths and stupid eyes, hearkening to the din of voices that floated out on the tranquil air, the snatches of ribald songs, the raucous bursts of laughter, the clink of glasses, the clank of steel, the rattle of dice, and the strange soldier oaths that fell with every throw, and which to them must have sounded almost as ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... the ribald songs, the biting jests, the terrible threats and vows of vengeance; in their stead I heard praises of the Queen-Mother; openly expressed admiration of the youthful monarch, who has, since then, advanced his country to the highest pinnacle ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... Joan dear! They don't know the meaning of words. They are ribald, uneducated people. You call your ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... fourth and all the rest of them. The station became a sty where before it had been a kennel; the flies multiplied; the stenches increased in volume and strength, if such were possible; the windows of the littered waiting room, with their cracked half panes, were like ribald eyes winking at the living afflictions which continually trailed past them; the floors looked as though there had ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... middle hour of the night. Many, just out of banquet-hall, theatre, and circus, thronged the main thoroughfares of the capital. Cries of venders, ribald songs, shouts of revelry, the hurrying of many feet roused the good people who, wearied by other nights of dissipation, now sought repose. They turned, uneasily, reflecting that to-morrow ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... bared a demon face; He filled the night with ribald song; For many a league, in evil case, We danced our leaden feet along. And every rood, in that foul wine, I pledged his fate: he ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... and scoffed without a shock to the conscience and a revolt of the heart. As the deer recoils by instinct from the tiger, as the very look of the scorpion deters you from handling it, though you never saw a scorpion before, so the very first line in some ribald profanity on which the Tinker put his black finger, made Lenny's blood run cold. Safe, too, was the peasant boy from any temptation in works of a gross and licentious nature, not only because of the happy ignorance of his rural life, but because of a more enduring ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... up her skirts and fled, whirling up the veranda steps and into the house like a small cyclone, never pausing until a locked door lay between her and a ribald, unfeeling world. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... grew tired of their ribald comments and curtly ordered them to make a new and exhaustive search of the unused portions of the basement—those dark earth banks, with their overhead networks of water and drain pipes, heavily insulated cables of electric wires, cobwebby rafters and rough shelves holding ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... her down into the muskeg, directing the girl's course with a flow of obscene and ribald profanity. ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... The burgomaster smoked his pipe in peace; the substantial solace of his domestic cares, after her daily toils were done, sat soberly at the door, with her arms crossed over her apron of snowy white without being insulted by ribald street walkers or vagabond boys—those unlucky urchins who do so infest our streets, displaying under the roses of youth the thorns and briars of iniquity. Then it was that the lover with ten breeches, and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... a frightful glitter in his eyes, an ugly ooze about his bloodless lips, a flickering effort of his shriveled fingers to adjust themselves to some ribald rhythm, Raikes began to sing, with the dry rasp and ancient husk of a ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... strongly of the madness of coming to terms with the present rulers of France. Could any statesman not gifted with second sight have spoken otherwise? At that time the Reign of Terror was approaching its climax. The Goddess of Reason had lately been enthroned in Notre Dame amidst ribald songs and dances. The schism between Robespierre and the atheistical party was beginning to appear; and few persons believed that France would long bend the knee before the lords of the guillotine, whose resources were largely derived ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... appearance, so as to aid the comic effect of his action, and armed with a dagger of lath, perhaps as symbolical that his use of weapons was but to the end of provoking his own defeat. Therewithal he was vastly given to cracking ribald and saucy jokes with and upon the Devil, and treating him in a style of coarse familiarity and mockery; and a part of his ordinary business was to bestride the Devil, and beat him till he roared, and the audience roared with him; the scene ending with ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... became aware that two men were following him through the lots, and that with a closeness of attention indicating more than common interest. To the perception of his keenly sensitive Southern nature they at once became ribald Yankee vandals, hoping for unseemly amusement from the detection of some awkwardness in the Indian-club-play of a defeated but not conquered Southern Gentleman; and, in the haughty sectional pride of his contemptuous soul, he indignantly determined to show not ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... have chosen as a companion in his hour of darkness. Reggie was not soothing. He would insist on addressing him by his old Eton nickname of Boots which Percy detested. And all the way down he had been breaking out at intervals into ribald comments on the recent unfortunate occurrence which ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and with the proper differences that pertain to philosophic genius, artistic skill, and ribald ruffianism, sufficiently indicate the dissolution of the social bond in Italy. They mark their age as the age of adventurers, bandits, bullies, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... could think of a time when his childish knees had bent before the good God, of whom a kind friend had told him, and his own mother—who should have been prostrate beside him in penitence for her sins both against him and her Maker—shouted her ribald songs even in his unwilling ears. No wonder Mr. Bond thought it strange that Pat had any yearning left for the good and the exalted. But his heart did heave mightily beneath the mass of corruption that his own parents had heaped above it, and he felt it gradually loosening, so that the ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... humour, with blasphemous and obscene detail, attacked the legitimacy of their births and the purity of their conjugal relations: he used an Oriental imagery and an Oriental emphasis to accentuate his ribald scorn. Nor did he conceal his contempt for the students whose work he examined. By them he was hated and feared; the women by his brutal sarcasm he reduced often to tears, which again aroused his ridicule; and he remained at the studio, notwithstanding the protests of those who suffered too bitterly ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... bearing the torch and axe. This specialty is Mr. Cleveland's long suit. Little wonder that his school should place him at its head. His preeminence in the field where self-admiration is a supreme virtue and ribald abuse passes for irrefutable argument will scarcely be denied by anybody who shall have read the following characteristic specimens from this Waldorf essay, carefully written down and calmly delivered: "We are gathered ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... his fine motive was apparent) took care to bring their ribald remarks under Burton's notice. Furny's idea evidently was to point out to Burton that his position was untenable, that it was not fitting that the same man should deal with Mr. Wrackham and with Ford Lankester. He had to keep himself clean for him. If he didn't see it he must be ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the surviving Union and Confederate officers to give an account of the bravest act observed by each during the Civil War. Colonel Thomas W. Higginson said that at a dinner at Beaufort, S. C., where wine flowed freely and ribald jests were bandied, Dr. Miner, a slight, boyish fellow who did not drink, was told that he could not go until he had drunk a toast, told a story, or sung a song. He replied: "I cannot sing, but I will give a toast, although I must drink it ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... gone to sleep in splendid isolation under the verandah of an empty house, but awoke among some Munsters, who greeted dawn with ribald songs. Harnessed up after breakfast, and marched off through the town, past the head-quarters, where Roberts reviewed us and the 38th. He was standing with a large Staff at the foot of the steps. The order "eyes right" gave ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... enough to think of fondling his master in the same manner as his favourite lap-dog, and was well basted for his pains. I understood that fable to signify, that what is graceful and comely in some is not so in others. Let the ribald flout and jeer, the mountebank tumble,—let the common fellow, who has made it his business, imitate the song of birds and the gestures of animals, but not the man of quality, who can deserve no credit or renown from any skill in ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... month's imprisonment, bread and water, and a flogging. He was marched through the city in a night-man's cart; and the king, meeting the procession, called out, as he passed, to the executioner, "Strike hard, and spare not that ribald; he ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... "Poetaster," the furious dramatic satire which blasted for upward of two centuries the fame or the credit of the poet to whose hand this masque has been hitherto assigned. In it, after a full allowance of rough and ribald jocosity, the presence of a poet becomes manifest with the entrance of an allegoric figure whose declamatory address begins ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... not all of the low, ignorant class I have described. Professors, teachers, musicians, all drift at times down the river; and one is often startled at finding in the apparently rough crew men who seem worthy of a better fate. To these the river experiences are generally new, and the ribald jokes and low river slang, with the ever-accompanying cheap corn-whiskey and the nightly riots over cutthroat euchre, must be at first a revelation. Hundreds of these low fellows will swear to you that the world owes them a living, and that they mean to have it; that they are gentlemen, ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... and happy circle of their own families—for they have none, nor among their neighbours, who may esteem and respect, but will scarce unbend before men who are become masters of their most secret thoughts. They therefore betake themselves to the pot-house, and in drinking and ribald conversation, look for that amusement which, under a better state of things, the Reformed pastor is sure to find in the bosom of his own family, and among his friends. I do not mean to justify the individuals, who, on the contrary, deserve utter reprobation; ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... it, could not have been readily discovered. His story had easily outstripped him, and duly amused the camp, so that now, as he rode along the busy street, in a stream of lesser vehicles, autos, and dusty horsemen, arriving by two confluent roads, he was angered more and more by the grins and ribald pleasantries bestowed by the throngs ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... mildly: 'So romantic—a young girl giving up all for God;' and Caroline gave the ribald laugh on which she prided herself— a shocking sound. 'Rose Mallett,' Sophia went on, so lost in her vision that the jarring laughter was not heard, 'such a pretty name—a nun! She would never be forgotten: ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... another stooped (my heart stopped beating), and picked up a letter lying on the ground—a letter that had dropped out of M. de Poissy's pocket—a letter from his wife, full of tender words of endearment and pretty babblings of love. This was read aloud, with coarse ribald comments on every sentence, each trying to outdo the previous speaker. When they came to some pretty words about a sweet Maurice, their little child away with its mother on some visit, they laughed at M. de la Tourelle, and told him that he would be hearing ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... she would not have him think wholly ill of this vagrant people, from whom she had often received food and comfort; and her worst danger, as he learned with shame, had come from the girovaghi or wandering monks, who are the scourge and dishonour of Christendom; carrying their ribald idleness from one monastery to another, and leaving on their way a trail of thieving, revelry and worse. Once or twice the Wild Woman had nearly fallen into their hands; but had been saved by her own quick wit and skill in woodcraft. ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... from the War a changed nation. The people who in 1870 made ribald verses and sang cynical songs over the plight of their country are now no more, and France emerges serious, resolute, to the great work which she has before her — of building the great first ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... affected, 'you will forgive, and our old and tried friend Copperfield will, I am sure, forgive, the momentary laceration of a wounded spirit, made sensitive by a recent collision with the Minion of Power—in other words, with a ribald Turncock attached to the water-works—and will ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... that both the children violently struggled, and that the round hard head of one of them butted him in the stomach. He divined that sounds of ribald laughter, in the distance, proceeded from the driver of the Marychurch station fly. He knew two small figures raced whooping down the lane attended by squelchings of mud and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... that she had come afoot, despite the knowledge that she would have suffered many inconveniences, accidental and intentional jostling, insolence and ribald jest. The Cantonese, excepting in the shops where he expects profit, always resents the intrusion of the fan-quei—foreign devil. The chair was torture. It hung from the centre of a stout pole, each end of which ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... leaning from the battlements of Hadrian's Mausoleum, watched smoke ascend from desolated palaces and desecrated temples, heard the wailing of women and the groans of tortured men, mingling with the ribald jests of German drunkards and the curses of Castilian bandits. Roaming those galleries and gazing from those windows, he is said to have exclaimed in the words of Job: "Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... year old at least, but the grief seemed of yesterday or of that morning. At times the friend that stood beside the prostrate woman stooped and spoke a soothing word to her, while she wailed out her woe; and in the midst some little ribald Irish boys came scuffling and quarreling up the pathway, singing snatches of an obscene song; and when both the wailing and the singing had died away, an old woman, decently clad, and with her many-wrinkled ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells |
