"Ribaldry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are free from his other weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of resourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The vast majority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are there, not to engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble agreeably upon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish experimentalists, precisely, who throng the midway at a world's fair, and go to smutty shows, and take in sex magazines, and read the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... saw all its branches shining with water, drops glistening along a thousand stray twigs. Then the voices of the labourers returning over the hills broke in upon his ears. He heard their shouts, the snatches of their songs, their noise, all the ribaldry of men merry in ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... the very depth of folly or craziness or I know not what. Often I cannot help dreading that some evil angel is persecuting us. For some ribaldry or petty spite or silly jest—in fact, for any reason whatsoever you invite hirelings to address you, and ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... Boston dared to be responsible for this ribaldry, and when it came home from New York and was actually cast before the people, words fail to convey the condition into which the patriarch was thrown. At last his emotions found a vent in a tract which he prepared jointly with ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... forth—He knows, to be vehement is the only way to come at his audience; and Daniel, when he sees my friend Greenhat come in, can give him a good hint, and cry out, 'This is only for the saints! the regenerated!' By this force of action, though mixed with all the incoherence and ribaldry imaginable, Daniel can laugh at his diocesan, and grow fat by voluntary subscription, while the parson of the parish goes to law for half his dues. Daniel will tell you, 'It is not the shepherd, but the sheep with the bell, which the flock follows.' Another thing, very wonderful this learned ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... constitution. Mr. Granger says, "He composed this book with a view of relieving his own melancholy, but increased it to such a degree, that nothing could make him laugh, but going to the bridge-foot and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen, which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter. Before he was overcome with this horrid disorder, he, in the intervals of his vapours, was esteemed one of the most ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... with the flaps of a moth: for there is as substantial a difference between light-heartedness and levity as between the crackling pyrotechnics that disturb the darkness of the night and the natural sunlight which enlivens the day. Indecency and ribaldry bring down a man to the level of the beast, divesting him of all his rational superiority and soul-dignity. What appears equally contemptible with the man who stoops to make grimaces, to utter expressions, to tell tales, in one ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... against the smaller fry of the pen with a vigor, a deadly earnestness, and a determination to wound, unparalleled in the history of letters. One of the most gifted of his critics, the late Rector of Lincoln College, speaks of the "Dunciad" roundly as "an amalgam of dirt, ribaldry, and petty spite," and M. Taine brought against it the more fatal charge of tediousness. But even if one admits the indiscriminate nature of that onslaught which confuses Bentley with such creatures of a day as ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... every member of the writing brotherhood, it was natural that his reviews should not pass without severe criticisms. He often complained of the insults, ribaldry, Billingsgate, and Bear-garden language to which he was exposed; and some of his biographers have taken these lamentations seriously, and expressed their regret that so good a man should have been so much persecuted. But as he deliberately provoked these ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... great octagonal structure of Paul's Cross stood in the centre, and just beneath the stone pulpit, where the sermons were wont to be preached, stood a man with a throng round him, declaiming a ballad at the top of his sing-song voice, and causing much loud laughter by some ribaldry about ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless disappearance from the stage of King Lear seems for once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have leave to say that the coincidence of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "Eternal Cesspools" over which the first of living humourists holds as it were for ever ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... on Church and State had much to excuse them in his day; but that on Joan of Arc was entirely unwarranted, uncalled for, and unpardonable. Still, could Joan have known the offence and the offender, we have no doubt she would have forgiven the ribaldry and the ribald as freely as she ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... their delinquencies; while the offenders themselves, would—a few of them—hang down their heads, and close their eyes in the unsufferable agony of shame; but by far the greater number would shout forth words of bold defiance or indecent ribaldry, would protrude the mocking tongue, or spit forth curses with dire volubility. Then would rise the shouts of gamins, then would come the thick volley of eggs, fish-heads, butcher's-offal, and all the garbage of the market, aimed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... this done; my heart died within me at the spectacle; and Master Teach or one of his acolytes (for my head was too much lost to be precise) remarked upon my pale face in a very alarming manner. I had the strength to cut a step or two of a jig, and cry out some ribaldry, which saved me for that time; but my legs were like water when I must get down into the skiff among these miscreants; and what with my horror of my company and fear of the monstrous billows, it was all I could do to keep an Irish tongue and break a jest or two as we were pulled aboard. By the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... administering a quack medicine instead of attending to the physician's prescriptions; a charge which he acknowledged and repeated in print. He published three successive papers in "The European Magazine" for 1788, assailing her with the coarsest ribaldry. "I have just read for the first time," writes Miss Seward in June, 1788, "the base, ungentleman-like, unmanly abuse of Mrs. Piozzi by that Italian assassin, Baretti. The whole literary world should unite in publicly reprobating such venomed and foul-mouthed railing." He died soon afterwards, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... satisfaction, by one whose Wit and good Manners are known to be just of the same weight, who, since he can be merry so easily, he shall laugh at some of the Reformers Hotch-potch too, as I have mingled it for him. Jewish Tetragramaton, Stigian Frogs, reeking Pandaemoniums, Debauch'd Protagonists, Nauseous Ribaldry, Ranting Smutt, Abominable Stench, Venus and St George, Juliana, the Witch and the Parson of Wrotham [Footnote: Collier's Epithetes.], with the admirable Popish story of the Woman that went to the Play-House and brought home the ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... brow a ruby circlet, less fertile in rays of fire than her black eyes, still moist with tears from her hearty laugh. She even threw her slipper at a statue gilded like a shrine, twisting herself about from very ribaldry and allowed her bare foot, smaller than a swan's bill, to be seen. This evening she was in a good humour, otherwise she would have had the little shaven-crop put out by the window without more ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... Islandic, bulldur, stultorum balbuties." Dr. Ogilvie, however, has queried its derivation from the "Spanish balda, a trifle, or baldonar, to insult with abusive language; Welsh, baldorz, to prattle. Mean, senseless prate; a jargon of words; ribaldry; anything jumbled together ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... George Calvert and Shakespeare, but in time of religious excitements was proclaimed to be the true hat of Guy Fawkes. I reclaimed it, and brought it to Princess Anne, and in a vain moment put it on my head and walked into the street. It was assailed with halloos and ribaldry." ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... parishioners, though the companions of his jovial hours have long ceased to feel the slightest compunctions arising from inward respect, when they laugh at his heinously red nose, or chorus in his ribaldry. The islanders of the South Sea are not singular then, in mentally disjoining official dignity from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... distracted among the pretty merchants and their dealers, that I knew not where to run first." On the other hand, we find complaints that young fops hindered business by lolling on the counter an hour longer than was necessary, and annoyed the young women who served them with ingenious ribaldry.] ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... added the common forms of a religious one, he would have been—not perhaps a worse fellow, but a far more offensive one, and harder to influence for good. Inclined to scoff, he would have had the religious material for jest and ribaldry ready to his hand; while if he had wanted to start as a hypocrite, it would have been specially easy. The true teaching for children is persons, history and doctrine in the old sense of the New Testament—instruction in righteousness, that ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... defiance. The decencies of private life were disregarded; conversations and correspondence which should have been confidential, were brought before the public eye; the ruthless warfare was carried into the bosom of private life; neither age nor sex were spared, the daily press teemed with ribaldry and falsehood; and even the tomb was not held sacred from the rancorous hostility which distinguished ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... dependence for preferment, a good treatment of the clergy would be the necessary consequence of such a reformation; and they would soon be wise enough to see their own duty and interest in qualifying themselves for lay-conversation, when once they were out of fear of being chocqued by ribaldry or profaneness. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... imagine Joan herself appearing in the England of to-day on much the same mission. It is not difficult to picture the contempt, the derision, the ribaldry, with which she would be greeted. In nearly every point her reception would be the same as it was, except that fewer people would believe in her inspiration. We have only to read her trial, or even the account given in Henry VI, to know what we should say of her now. There would ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the sidewalk and moved into the saloon, and the street was deserted for a time. Local No. 10 held its post down by the Company Store. It seemed like an age to the men at the head of the stairs. Yet Mr. Brotherton's easy running fire of ribaldry never stopped. He was excited and language came from his ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... your malice, AEschines, it was very simple to suppose that I should turn from the discussion of measures and policy to notice your scandal. I will do no such thing. I am not so crazed. Your lies and calumnies about my political life I will examine forthwith. For that loose ribaldry I shall have a word hereafter, if the jury desire to ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... street-sounds of fierce ribaldry and ghastly mirth, the voice of the dying woman penetrated, speaking more slowly, more distinctly, more terribly than it ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... between eight and nine o'clock. This company is open for additional hands to drop in at any time before the twelfth hour to partake of the frolic of the day. By eleven or twelve o'clock the ale or cider has so much warmed and elevated their spirits that their noisy jokes and ribaldry are heard to a considerable distance, and often serve to draw auxiliary force within the accustomed time. The dinner, consisting of the best meat and vegetables, is carried into the field between twelve ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his discourse. With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric, without parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the point. If any came expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his utterances. It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his own way ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... he persevered in visiting the church, or whether the seeds of a new and better growth of things began already to take root within him, I cannot take upon me to decide. To my relief and comfort, the solemn argument was never again profaned by ribaldry and unbecoming mirth; and, to my unfeigned delight, the teacher and the pupil were without one let or hinderance to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... versatility, frankness, and readiness of speech are all vividly portrayed, while his mettlesome temper and his arrogance are alike essential to his role, and are true to the record of the historical D'Ambois. But there is a coarseness of fibre in Chapman's creation, an occasional foul-mouthed ribaldry of utterance which robs him of sympathetic charm. He has in him more of the swashbuckler and the bully than of the courtier and the cavalier. Beaumont and Fletcher, one cannot help feeling, would have invested him with more refinement and grace, and would have given a tenderer ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... least defect of the English comedies is their offensiveness. I may sum up the whole in one word by saying, that after all we know of the licentiousness of manners under Charles II., we are still lost in astonishment at the audacious ribaldry of Wycherley and Congreve. Decency is not merely violated in the grossest manner in single speeches, and frequently in the whole plot; but in the character of the rake, the fashionable debauchee, a moral scepticism is directly ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... But playgoers had but to be shown something better than that they had, to discover that the convention of the Restoration needed new blood. A justification of its choice of material has been attempted: there is no inconsistency in affirming that the tendency to use it with a mere monotony of ribaldry was emphatic. Of this tendency the most notable and useful illustration is Wycherley, because in point of wit and dramatic skill he dwarfed his colleagues. As Mr. Swinburne has said, the art of Congreve is different in kind, not merely in degree, from the cruder and more boisterous ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... whole very fond of the Genoese; they have, it is true, much ribaldry and many vices, but they are a brave and chivalrous people, and have ever been so, and from them I have never experienced aught but kindness ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... their age. It cannot be denied that some of them try our patience, in the epitaphs even more perhaps than in the carvings, and "merely mock whom they were meant to honour." Two out of a vast number may be selected as painful evidences of a departed century's tombstone ribaldry. The first, from a village near Bath, is a deplorable mixture of piety ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... house front under repair supplied a scantling. Plooie was hustled upon it. He fell off. They jammed him back again. He clung, wide-eyed, white-faced, and silent. The mob, for it was that now, bore him with jeers and jokes and ribaldry along the ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a second invitation to proceed upon his favourite topic. He was soon launched, and as the little room filled, his pale and sunken cheeks grew red with excitement, his tongue was unloosed, and he poured out a continuous stream of blasphemous ribaldry such as would have shocked the ears of a revolutionist of the year '89 or of a petroleuse of the nineteenth century. It seemed as though the spring once opened would never dry. His eyes flashed, his fingers ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Latin countries employ. It read: "Giovanni Giolitti, this day taken to himself by the Devil, lamented by his faithful friends"; and there followed a list of noted Giolittians, some of whom even then were voting for war with Austria. A bit of Roman ribaldry, specimen of that ebullition of the piazza disdained by the German Chancellor; nevertheless, it must have bit through the hide of the politician, who for the sake of his safety was not among the Deputies voting at Montecitorio. Later I read in a Paris newspaper that ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... not undervalue him. If he had been less a man than he was, they would not have taken the trouble to cover him with their drunken ribaldry. He had scored off them in the past in just such sprees as this, when he had the power to do so, and used the power good-naturedly and quietly—but ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... already sunk in insensibility looked round on each other almost sobered for the moment, and all speechless alike. Not even the clash of the wine-cups was now heard at the banqueting-table—nothing was audible but the sound, still fitfully rising and falling, of the voices of terror, ribaldry, and anguish from the street; and the hoarse convulsive accents of the hunchback, still uttering at intervals his fearful identification of the dead body above him: ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... pointing out to him the "bold, upholsterrific blunders" to be found in the architecture of the day, and commenting on them in a caustic, colloquial style—large, loose, discursive—a blend of Ruskin, Carlyle and Whitman, yet all Mr. Sullivan's own. He descends, at times, almost to ribaldry, at others he rises to poetic and prophetic heights. This is all a part of his method alternately to shame and inspire his pupil to some sort of creative activity. The syllabus of Mr. Sullivan's scheme, as it existed in his mind during the writing of Kindergarten Chats, and outlined by him in ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... for I was insensible, soul-less; and even when the return of thought came, it was all confusion. Was this Oxford? Were these its manners? Were such its inhabitants? Oaths twenty in a breath, unmeaning vulgar oaths; ribaldry, such as till that hour ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Epist. 26. Lib. 6. commends the English Nobility for their great Application to all useful Learning, and entertaining themselves at Table with learned Discourses, when the Table-Talk of Churchmen was nothing but Ribaldry and Profaneness. In Epist. 10. Lib. 5, which he addresses to Andrelinus, he invites him to come into England, recommending it as worth his While, were it upon no other Account, than to see the charming ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... fact that immodesty of expression, the recollection derived, it may often be, accidentally and unwillingly from oral sources during the previous life, is one of the numerous phases of insanity; and not only are the song-fragments chanted by Ophelia, but even the ribaldry addressed to her by Hamlet, in the play-scene, vindicated, there being little doubt that Shakespeare intended the simulated madness of the latter through his intellectual supremacy to be equally true to nature, the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the common people, and were more or less popular in their character. More details will be given when we examine them in their completer form. All such parts of these early scenic entertainments as were not mere conversation or ribaldry, were probably composed in the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... lights, and round the table, emptying their flaming bowls of drink, and exchanging the wildest jests and ribaldry, sit men and women, waited on by rascally valets and attendants as dissolute as their mistresses—perhaps the very worst company in the world. There doesn't seem to be a pretence of morals. At the head of the table sits Mirabel or Belmour (dressed in the French fashion and waited ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and the most excellent continuance of the plot to the very end, that ever I saw, or think ever shall, and all possible, not only to be done in the time, but in most other respects very admittable, and without one word of ribaldry; and the house, by its frequent plaudits, did show their sufficient approbation. So home; with much ado in an hour getting a coach home, and, after writing letters at my office, I went home to supper and to bed, now resolving to set up my rest as to plays ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... infinite numbers of our brethren, only because they believed truly and sincerely in Jesu Christ. But of that great and foul number of harlots, fornicators, adulterers, what one have they at any time (I say not killed, but) either excommunicated, or once attached? Why! voluptuousness, adultery, ribaldry, whoredom, murdering of kin, incest, and others more abominable parts, are not these counted sin at Rome? Or, if they be sin, ought "Christ's vicar, Peter's successor, the most holy father," so lightly and slightly to bear them, as though ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... Rheingold, a disreputable drinking cellar, and disappeared from my sight down its steps. A great shout greeted him, and the rattle of tankards on a table, as he joined what was evidently his coterie. Standing outside, I heard song and ribaldry within. The heir-presumptive to the throne of the Empire was too obviously a drunken brawler; a friend and comrade of ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... they enjoyed themselves, ridiculing that young man! For five good minutes they stood there, shouting ribaldry at him, deriding him, mocking him, jeering at him. They peppered him with stale jokes, they even made a few new ones and threw at him. They hurled at him all the private family jokes belonging to our set, and which must have been perfectly ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... their open insulting religion in this manner by several good people of every persuasion, and that, and the violent raging of the infection, I suppose, was the occasion that they had abated much of their rudeness for some time before, and were only roused by the spirit of ribaldry and atheism at the clamour which was made when the gentleman was first brought in there, and perhaps were agitated by the same devil, when I took upon me to reprove them; though I did it at first with all the calmness, temper, and good manners that I could, which for a while they insulted me the ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... even the very modified praise which has been given to him, if he had been constant to the muckheap. He could never quite help approaching it now and then; but as time went on and the Empire substituted a sort of modified decency for the Feasts of Republican Reason and ribaldry, he tried things less uncomely. Adelaide de Meran (his longest single book), Tableaux de Societe, L'Officieux, and others, are of this class; and without presenting a single masterpiece in their own kind, they all, more or less, give evidence of that advance ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which "veritas" is there used; for there was unbounded candor and frankness, under the inspiring hospitality of our host, aided by his skilful management of the conversation. Nor was there, I am bound to say, much of coarse ribaldry, even from the free-spoken representative of the Tindals and Woolstons of other days. But the varieties of judgment and opinion in that small company were almost numberless. Fellowes, and two of the Rationalists, were firm believers in the theory of "insight"; that the human ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... perfect equality of the sexes." When the wrath of woman thus praises God, the one who believes that through woman's status in the Bible and in the Christian Church this perfect equality is being worked out day by day need not take up controversial cudgels. Ribaldry in woman seems more gross than in man, and this is woman's ribaldry. It is profane to speak of the "feminine element in the Godhead." God is a spirit. There is no more a feminine than a masculine element in the Godhead. Sex belongs to mortal life and its conditions. It begins and ends with ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... reposed in the most emphatic pledges of British Parties or leaders, and we had been wiser in 1890 if we had taken sides with Parnell against the whole world had the need arisen. As it was, fought on front and flank, with the thunders of the Church, and the ribaldry of malicious tongues to scatter their venomed darts abroad, Parnell was a doomed man. Not that he lacked indomitable courage or loyal support. But his frail body was not equal to the demands of the undaunted spirit upon it, and so he went to his grave broken but not beaten—great even ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... ready to teach, and ready to obey, as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity. In this age of opulence and refinement whom can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life, will turn with disdain from the simplicity of his country fire-side. Such as mistake ribaldry for humour, will find no wit in his harmless conversation; and such as have been taught to deride religion, will laugh at one whose chief stores of ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... entertaining. It contains not merely the opinions expressed of the poem by the reviews and magazines, but those of the newspapers, and enables us to gather the judgment of the English people upon that strange combination of sublimity and ribaldry, sentiment and wit, tenderness and mockery, at the time it first blazed forth from the press. The suppressed dedication of the poem to Southey is also given in full, with all its brutal blackguardism and drunken brilliancy. In truth, the volume conveys an accurate impression of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... dependence on Sterne excludes here any extended analysis of the connection. The style is abrupt, full of affected gaiety and raillery, conversational and journalistic. The stories, observations and reflections, in prose and verse, represent one and all the ribaldry of Sterne at its lowest ebb, as illustrated, for example, by the story of the abbess of Andouillets, but without the charm and grace with which that tale begins. The author copies Sterne in the tone of his lucubrations; the material is drawn from other sources. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Carlos Santander; who, relishing the jest, joined in the "ha! ha!" till the old convent rang with their coarse ribaldry. ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... who had undertaken to teach us modesty swarmed in too. They dragged a sheep into the lecture-room, lighted pipes, produced bottles, drank, smoked, and abused us ladies to our faces, and interrupted the lecturer at intervals with their howls and ribaldry: that was intended to show the professor he should not be listened to any more if he admitted the female students. The affair got wind, and other students, not connected with medicine, came pouring in, with no worse ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... had obtruded himself into my presence, into one of my own houses, the very house of the murdered man, and there, when I was consulting with the person to whom I have alluded as to the expediency of ridding ourselves of these objectionable characters, he met me with ribaldry and personal insolence. When I tell your lordship that he made insinuations about my own daughters, so gross that I cannot repeat them to you, I am sure that I need go no further. There were present at this meeting Mr. Puddleham, the Methodist minister, and Mr. Henry Gilmore, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... then walk by yourselves. Let not us be accessory to your putting the ladies out of countenance with your senseless ribaldry, which you roar out aloud as often as they pass by you, and when you have made a handsome woman blush, then you think you ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... controversy respecting the Resurrection, to which Sherlock's 'Tryal of the Witnesses' gave both the impulse and the form. Annet, like Woolston, was prosecuted for blasphemy and profanity; and if the secular arm should ever be appealed to in such matters, which is doubtful, he deserved it by the coarse ribaldry of his ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... over the yellow teeth, and that flushed face was not pretty to look upon. Mulvaney nodded sympathy, and Ortheris, moved by his comrade's passion, brought up the rifle to his shoulder, and searched the hillside for his quarry, muttering ribaldry about a sparrow, a spout, and a thunder-storm. The voice of the watercourse supplied the necessary small talk till ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... are enough babies born, too many of them are born only to die in infancy. We need no further proof of the urgent need for conscientious inquiry, call it by what name you please. The science of common sense is all-sufficient. The seemingly intelligent individual who can only find material for ribaldry in this connection is a more serious buffoon than he imagines. It is apparent that our methods are wrong. Any constructive effort to correct them is commendable. When it is stated that 20 per cent. of the American women ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... traffic-thridden street Is ribboned o'er with shade and shine, And webbed with wire and choked with heat; Where smokes with fouler smokes entwine; And where, at evening, darkling lanes Fume with a sickly ribaldry— Above the squalors and the pains, A wild rose blows ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... novices as his compeers in our own prisons, and he carefully instructs his hopeful pupils in the best ways of avenging their wrongs upon society. Some in the prison are merry, and enjoy a dance, while others are indulging in obscene jests and ribaldry. Still, there are those that find means to labor and to work at repairing shoes or clothes in the midst of this babel ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... of Paris has been sacked, and every object in it demolished. —— told me that the ribaldry and coarse jests of the mob on this occasion were disgusting beyond measure; and that they ceased not to utter the most obscene falsehoods, while they wreaked their vengeance on the property of this venerable prelate, against whom they can bring no charge, except the suspicion ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... genius. What has the Romantic school to exhibit, after its inimitable founder, as a set-off to this long line of greatness? The ephemeral and now forgotten lights of the British stage—the blasting indecencies of Beaumont and Fletcher; the vigorous ribaldry of Dryden; the shocking extravagances of the recent French and Spanish stage; the Tour de Nesle, and other elevating pieces, which adorn the modern Parisian theatre, and train to virtuous and generous feeling the present youth of France. Shakspeare himself, with all his transcendent excellences, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... one, so harmless, so guileless, so innocent, should be paraded through the streets like a wild beast which it was unsafe to have at large, that he should be exposed to the prying looks of coarse and unfeeling men, and compelled to hear their vile ribaldry, and, finally, compelled to an ignominious punishment, among the vicious, in a workhouse! The disgrace was more than she could bear. It seemed her heart would break. Overcome by her emotions, she left ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... be observed that the comedy of Greece is to be ranked under three distinct heads. The plays composed of ribaldry, defamatory licentiousness, indecency and loose jokes, which prevailed on the stage while the supreme power remained in the hands of the multitude, constitute the first of these; and it goes by the name of the old comedy. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... Rhetorical elokventa, retorika. Rheumatic reuxmatisma. Rheumatism reuxmatismo. Rhinoceros rinocero. Rhomb rombo. Rhombus rombo. Rhubarb rabarbo. Rhyme rimi. Rhythm ritmo. Rib ripo. Ribald malcxasta, dibocxa. Ribaldry dibocxo—ajxo. Ribbon rubando. Rice rizo. Rich, to grow ricxigxi. Rich ricxa. Riches ricxeco. Rid malembarasi, liberigi. Riddle (sieve) kribrilo. Riddle enigmo, logogrifo. Ride rajdi. Ridge supro, pinto. Ridge (agricul.) sulko. Ridicule moki. Ridiculous ridinda. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Heywood's "Dialogue, conteyninge the Number in Effecte of all the Proverbes in the English Tunge, 1561." There are more editions of this little volume than Warton has noticed. There is some humour in his narrative, but his metre and his ribaldry are heavy ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... author. The father's indiscretion let out the secret; and the sale, when the book was known to be written by a nobody, fell off at once, or so Bentham believed. The anonymous writer, however, was denounced and accused of being the author of much ribaldry, and among other accusations was said to be not only the translator but the writer of the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... fellows revelling in senseless ribaldry and inebriety (continues the reviewer) this song might be deemed very fine; but we shrewdly suspect that if the lines had been spoken at the theatre instead of being sung, the audience would have resented ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... demoralizing the public sentiment. Under a wretched mask of stupid drollery, slavery, war, the social glass, and, in short, all the valuable and time-honoured institutions justly dear to our common humanity and especially to republicans, are made the butt of coarse and senseless ribaldry by this low-minded scribbler. It is time that the respectable and religious portion of our community should be aroused to the alarming inroads of foreign Jacobinism, sansculottism, and infidelity. It is a fearful proof of the wide-spread nature of this contagion, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... obscene emblems and disgusting epigrams, so that this haunt of learning presents the aspect of the lowest brothel; and the professor's chair has become a more intolerable seat than the pillory, owing to the missiles flung at him and the ribaldry with which he is assailed. The manners and conversation of the students must have been disgusting beyond measure, to judge by a letter of complaint from a father detailing the contamination to which his son was exposed ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... law commanding a blasphemer to be stoned, could not teach one Israelite love to God, but it could save the streets of Israel from scandalous ribaldry. ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... of Madame Dacier, who is quoted by Lessing! In the introduction to her translations of the Amphitruo, Rudens and Epidicus (issued in 1683), she apologizes for Plautus on the ground that he had to win approval for his comedies from an audience used to the ribaldry ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... periodicals on this side of the ocean it may be safely said, that the intelligence of the reader forces their criticism up to some decent standard of honest painstaking. We may thus explain the bewilderment which came over us at that burst of vulgar ribaldry from the leading British press, in which the organs above named have achieved a scandalous preeminence. Vibrating from the extreme of shallowness to the extreme of sufficiency, scorning to be limited in abuse by adhering to any single hypothesis, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Of ribaldry that smelleth sweet, To Dagon and to Ashtoreth; Of bloody stripes from head to feet, He will endure unto the death, Being ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... crowd and out of the house. Drawing a reboso about her head she walked swiftly down the street and across the plaza. Sounds of ribaldry came from the lower end of the town, but the aristocratic quarter was very quiet, and she walked unmolested to the house of General Castro. The door was open, and she went down the long hall to the sleeping ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... bloody and mangled face, and found that it was indeed the prince. His body was carried, with infamous ribaldry, on an ass to the castle of Jarnac, and thrown contemptuously upon the ground. Several illustrious prisoners were brought to the spot and butchered in cold blood, and their corpses thrown upon that of the prince, while the soldiers passed a night of drunkenness ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... of ribaldry that made my foot twitch in my boot. Behind his back, I pocketed the priceless relic, dank and red with my unworthy blood, and followed him back ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... series, addressed to the secretary of a free-thought association, expresses his firmly rooted disgust at the use of mere ribaldry in attacking the theological husks ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... manuscript. I cannot but think, though he has mistaken the Christian name of the author, that it is to Hugh Binning's Case of Conscience, that Samuel Colvill, the ungodly son of a pious mother, alludes, in that mass of ribaldry and indecency, "The Whigs Supplication," when describing the library of ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... lowering their bayonets to them and giving vent to blood-freezing curses, fierce oaths, coarse jeers, and rewarding the desperate endeavours of the priests to fulfil the desires of their captors with mocking laughter and ribaldry. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... hour, and the inheritance of their children fall to ashes. By the red, consuming light, poured past the straggling Confederate soldiers, dead to the acknowledgment of private rights, and sacking shop and home with curses and ribaldry; the suburban citizens and the menial negroes adopted their examples; carrying off whatever came next their hands, and with arms full of "swag," dropping it in the highway, lured by some dearer plunder. Negroes, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... subject of ribaldry. On the whole we must have been a strange looking pair. Feeling rather small under the scrutiny (not bethinking us that within a very few months we would be putting on similar airs of superiority towards weary tramps arriving under like conditions) ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only. Some of his persons are vicious, and some virtuous; some are unlearned, or (as Chaucer calls them) lewd, and some are learned. Even the ribaldry of the low characters is different: the Reeve, the Miller, and the Cook are several men, and distinguished from each other, as much as the mincing lady prioress, and the broad-speaking gap-toothed wife of Bath. But enough of this: there is such a variety of game springing up before ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... horse the day before and was useless. That last faint hope was gone. On the night of December 23d the King slept, a prisoner surrounded with hostile guards, in the noble castle which in the days of his youth had rung with Jonson's lyrics and ribaldry; and the "Gipsy of the Masque" had prophesied that his "name in peace or wars, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... brandy-and water), and that mischievous little wag, little Nadab the Improvisatore (who had just come in), began to mimic him, feeling his imaginary whiskers, after the manner of the stranger, and flapping about his pocket-handkerchief in the most ludicrous manner. Hoskins checked this ribaldry by sternly looking towards Nadab, and at the same time called upon the gents to give their orders, the waiter being in the room, and Mr. Bellew about to ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Dedication the most passionate language is used against all contemporary poets—especially against those who now, he says, practise 'in dramatic, as they term it: stage-poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation,' and 'all licence of offence to God and man.' Their petulancy, he continues, 'hath not only rapt me to present indignation, but made me studious heretofore;' for by them 'the filth of the time is uttered, and with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... were measured; his manner tinged with seeming paternal interest; but, as through a mask, she discerned his face, cynical, libidinous, the countenance of a Sybarite, not a king. The air became stifling; the ribaldry of laughter enveloped her; instinctively she glanced around, and her restless, troubled gaze fell ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... advanced that day twenty-seven miles, to the garrison house of John Woodcock, within the limits of the present town of Attleborough. Woodcock kept a sort of tavern at what was called the Ten Mile River, which tavern he was enjoined by the court to "keep in good order, that no unruliness or ribaldry be permitted there." He was a man of some consequence, energetic, reckless, and not very scrupulous in regard to the rights of the Indians. An Indian owed him some money. As Woodcock could not collect the debt, he paid himself by going into ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... of dissolute mates and midshipmen of the old Queen, 98, who held a sort of examination of ribaldry for a ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... They from dispute proceed to ribaldry, From words to blows; and through their mickle ire, Fierce battle was inflamed, and blazed more high Than ever lightly-kindled straw took fire. King Rodomont is steeled in panoply; Sacripant neither plate nor mail attire: Yet so ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... in which he classes the Restoration dramatists thus:— Congreve—Genius 15, Judgment 16, Learning 14, Versification 14; Vanbrugh—14, 15,14,10; Farquhar—15, 15, 10, io. Unlike Goldsmith, unhappily, Farquhar's moral tone is not high; sensuality is confounded with love, ribaldry mistaken for wit The best that can be said of him that he contrasts favourably with his contemporary dramatists; Virtue is not always uninteresting in his pages. He is free from their heartlessness, malignity, and cruelty. The ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... Liberals and Democrats. Again he is prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned. His boys, well taught in all manner of farm-work, send him, from his home in the country, hampers of fresh fruits, to relieve the tedium of Newgate. Discharged at length, and continuing his ribaldry in the columns of the "Register," he flies before an Act of Parliament, and takes new refuge in America. He is now upon Long Island, earnest as in his youth in agricultural pursuits. The late Dr. Francis of New York used to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... part restrained by stays 80) no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of so uncommon a seraglio! They were food from all the venom of the Jacobites; and, indeed nothing could be grosser than the ribaldry that was vomited out in lampoons, libels, and every channel of abuse, against the sovereign and the new court, and chaunted even in their hearing ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... such a time and place; no excuses are accepted. Then follow the Consolations of Intercourse. Conducted with "shattering candour" (as one has said who is in spirit a member of this Club, though not yet, alas, inducted), the meetings may sometimes resolve themselves into a ribaldry, sometimes into a truthful pursuit of Beauty, sometimes into a mere logomachy. But in these symposiums, unmarred by the crude claim of duty, the Club does with single-minded resolve pursue the only lasting satisfaction allowed ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... satirical prints; and although the popularity of Hood's "Comic Annual" and Cruikshank's "Comic Almanac" was pointed to, they would have nothing to do with a weekly, however much it professed to supersede previous ribaldry with ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Nichirenites have been well called the Ranters of Buddhism. Their revival meetings make Bedlam seem silent, and reduce to gentle murmurs the camp-meeting excesses with which we are familiar in our own country. They are the most sectarian of all sects. Their vocabulary of Billingsgate and the ribaldry employed by them even against their Buddhist brethren, cast into the shade those of Christian sectarians in their fiercest controversies. "A thousand years in the lowest of the hells is the atonement prescribed by the Nichirenites for the priests of all other sects." When ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... carelessly made, more ridiculed, more lightly broken; no sacred subject that is oftener blasphemed; and nothing else in life affecting the dignity and welfare of man which is oftener attacked with vulgar ribaldry in public, or outraged in private by the secret conduct of it. No. You are not to blame, nor am I. It is not our fault that we form the junction of the old abuses and the new modes of thought. Some two ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... a little before our Landing, one of them, instead of returning the Civility, asked us what queer old Put we had in the Boat, and whether he was not ashamed to go a Wenching at his Years? with a great deal of the like Thames-Ribaldry. Sir ROGER seemd a little shocked at first, but at length assuming a Face of Magistracy, told us, That if he were a Middlesex Justice, he would make such Vagrants know that Her Majesty's Subjects were no more to be abused by Water than ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... answered Steingerd, "an ill will is plain to hear. I shall tell Thorvald of this ribaldry: no man would sit still ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown |
