"Buffoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remain as to their talking. Then there is superabundant proof of the relish with which men enjoyed, in the Middle Ages, silly, teazing or puzzling answers; the questioner remaining at the end rolled up in the repartees, gasping as a fly caught in a spider's web. The Court fool or buffoon had for his principal merit his clever knack of returning witty or confusing answers; the best of them were preserved; itinerant minstrels remembered and repeated them; clerks turned them into Latin, and gave them place in their collections of exempla. They ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... acquaintance whatsoever a condescension, nor accept it from the greatest upon unworthy or ignominious terms. I know a certain lord that has often invited a set of people, and proposed for their diversion a buffoon player, and an eminent poet, to be of the party; and which was yet worse, thought them both sufficiently recompensed by the dinner, and the honour of his company. This kind of insolence is risen to such a height, that I my self was the other day sent to by a man with a title, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to draw ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... the jester is always a Brahman, and, therefore, of a caste superior to the king himself; yet his business is to excite mirth by being ridiculous in person, age, and attire. He is represented as grey-haired, hump-backed, lame and hideously ugly. In fact, he is a species of buffoon, who is allowed full liberty of speech, being himself a universal butt. His attempts at wit, which are rarely very successful, and his allusions to the pleasures of the table, of which he is a confessed votary, are absurdly contrasted with ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... not in my nature to derive consolation from such scenes; from theatres, whose buffoon laughter and discordant mirth awakened distempered sympathy, or where fictitious tears and wailings mocked the heart-felt grief within; from festival or crowded meeting, where hilarity sprung from the worst feelings of our nature, or such enthralment of the better ones, as impressed it with ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... tragedian, buffoon—all in one. There was no shade of human emotion which he did not seem capable ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... popular name among the Dutch for a buffoon; a corruption of pickle-h[:a]rin ("a hairy sprite"), answering to ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... joined Voltaire with Dennis and Rymer. 'Dennis and Rymer think Shakespeare's Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire censures his kings as not completely royal. Dennis is offended that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire, perhaps, thinks decency violated when the Danish usurper is represented as a drunkard. But Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident.... His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. He knew that Rome, like every other ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... and ill-mannered. As in cuffing all blows are aimed at the face, so it fares in these rencounters, where he that wears the toughest leather on his visage comes off with victory though he has ever so much the disadvantage upon all other accounts. For a buffoon is like a mad dog that has a worm in his tongue, which makes him bite at all that light in his way; and as he can do nothing alone, but must have somebody to set him that he may throw at, he that performs that office with the ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the man distinguishes himself from the beast, seeing that no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... of these did Zimri stand, A man so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest madman, who could every hour employ With something new to wish or to enjoy! Railing and praising were his ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... man of luxury, pride and pleasure, he is a master of art and learning, though affecting to despise it. Those who can think that the proud huntsman and noble housekeeper, Chaucer's Monk, is intended for a buffoon or burlesque character, know little ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... The T. polyglottis, or buffoon-bird, is never found north of 46 deg. N. latitude in the summer. This bird pours forth all sorts of notes in a short space of time, without any apparent order. The thrush, the wren, the jay, and the robin are imitated in ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... stump of his cigar over the gunwale, "that the experiences of the past year have not been all an excursion into the 'Arabian Nights'? If it were not for that fine marble relief in my trunk which I bought of that miserable buffoon in the Via Sistina, I should easily persuade myself that the actual world were bounded on the east by the Atlantic and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. I was just considering whether I should try to smuggle it through the custom-house, or whether, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... almost exceed belief. The societies had regular constitutions. Their presiding officers were called kings, princes, captains, archdeacons, or rejoiced in similar high-sounding names. Each chamber had its treasurer, its buffoon, and its standard-bearer for public processions. Each had its peculiar title or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate motto. By the year 1493, the associations had become ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... like a tumbler, tittering, at the same time, like a human being. Swanhilda for a while kept herself quiet; but as the luminous antic ceased not practising his harlequinade, she peevishly exclaimed—'What buffoon is carrying on his fooleries here? I desire to be left in peace.' The light vanished instantly, and Swanhilda already had congratulated herself upon gaining her point, when suddenly a loud shrilly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... occurs in many forms, but in all Marcolf (or whatever other name he bears) is a keen contester with the king in a battle of wits. No doubt, at first Marcolf filled a serious, respectable role; in course of time, his character degenerated into that of a clown or buffoon. It is difficult to summarize the legend, it varies so considerably in the versions. Marcolf in the best-known forms, which are certainly older than Zabara, is "right rude and great of body, of visage greatly misshapen and ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... Library is filled with books which have copyright, but no other right, human or divine, to exist at all; and when one of us does succeed in asserting his personality, he usually only makes himself odd and ridiculous. He rushes into polygamous Mormonism, or buffoon revivalism, or shallow-minded atheism; nay, he will even become an anarchist, because a few men have too much money and too little soul. What we need is neither the absence of individuality nor a morbid individuality, but ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... come galloping down, with a jangle of bells, full of laughing, singing young people, returning from some excursion far up in the hills, where there had been feasting and dancing. Here a young lawyer—newly married and something of a privileged buffoon—was sitting on the lap of somebody else's wife, playing a concertina, and singing at the top of his voice. "Some of that Loreng man's doings again," people would say. "The place has never been the same since he came here." And they would get back to bed ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... nature, smartness, and animal spirits; hence arose a vivacity and fluency that were often amusing, and passed for very clever. Reserve she had none; would talk about strangers, or friends, herself, her mother, her God, and the last buffoon-singer, in a breath. At a hint from Rosa, she told her who the lady in the pink dress was, and the lady in the violet velvet, and so on; for each lady was defined by her dress, and, more or less, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... well have been said that the gaiety of nations was eclipsed; but to his contemporaries Rabelais appeared less as the enormous humourist, the buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar and man of science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation were in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound judgment, and even a habit of moderation. It is thus that he should still be regarded. Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the real? who can penetrate under this lying mask, to say, this smile conceals a black despair? no one, happily, no one! Stay, yes, love could never be mistaken; no, its instinct would enlighten it. But I hear my wife—my wife! Come to your post, inauspicious buffoon." ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... As pet buffoon of the tories about town, Mountfort was followed, at a considerable distance of time, by Estcourt—an actor who united wit and fine humor with irresistible powers of mimicry; and who contrived to acquire the respect and affectionate regard ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... stood and gaped at her. Underground politician that he was, he knew that Mirabelle had utterly destroyed the half of his ambition. She had made him a laughing-stock, a buffoon, a political joke. To think that his name was connected with a crusade against short-skirts and dancing—Ugh! Not even the average run of church-goers would swallow it. "Mayor!" he thought bitterly. "President of Council! I ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... worship of God—that it consisted simply of a chronic case of the snuffles. Jones has simply gone to the opposite extreme and transformed the Temple of the Deity into a variety dive. Nero fiddled while Rome burned; but Jones indulges in the levity of the buffoon while consigning millions of human beings to Hell. Alas, that so few preachers understand the pity which permeates all ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... intitled, A Light shining out of Darkness, &c. Wherein all the other religious Parties among us are as handsomly and learnedly banter'd and ridicul'd, as the Quakers have been in any Book against them. And when they were attack'd by one Samuel Young, a whimsical Presbyterian-Buffoon-Divine, who call'd himself Trepidantium Malleus, and set up for an Imitator of Mr. Alsop, in several Pamphlets full of Stories, Repartees, and Ironies; in which Young, perhaps, thought himself as secure from a Return of the like kind, as ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... not be turned back by such difficulties. He plunged ahead of his men, struck tip songs and cheers to keep them in spirit, played the buffoon, went wherever danger was greatest, and by an almost unmatched display of bravery, tact, and firmness, won the redoubled admiration of his suffering followers and held them together. Murmurs arose among the creoles, but the Americans showed no signs of faltering. For more than a week ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... mankind by your cruelties and your crimes. You have murdered your mother. You have murdered your wife. You are an incendiary. And not content with perpetrating these enormous atrocities, you have degraded yourself in the eyes of all Rome to the level of the lowest mountebank and buffoon, so as to make yourself the object of contempt as well as abhorrence. I hate and ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... that they meant well, these soldiers of France greeting their comrades of England. One man behaved like a buffoon, or as though he had lost his wits. Grasping the hand of a young engineer he danced round him, shouting "Camarade! camarade!" in a joyous sing-song which was ridiculous, and yet touching in its simplicity and faith. It was no wonder, I thought, that the French people believed in ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... have you to say? What explanation have you to offer for your conduct? You have behaved like a buffoon, sir—d'you hear ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... a sudden from a gentleman student to a dancing buffoon; for such, in fact, was the character in which I made my debut. I was one of those who formed the groups in the dramas, and were principally, employed on the stage in front of the booth, to attract company. I was ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon—I am speaking of Shakespeare's Thersites—has no touch of humour in all his currish composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even what ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... some critics as a grave moral censor, veiling his high purpose behind the grinning mask of comedy; by others as a buffoon of genius, whose only object was to raise a laugh. Both sides of the question are ingeniously and copiously argued in Browning's 'Aristophanes' Apology'; and there is a judicious summing up of the case of Aristophanes vs. Euripides in Professor ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... delighted to be spectators of the Philoctetes of Aristophon and the Jocasta of Silanion, wherein such wasting and dying persons are well acted; so must the young scholar, when he reads in a poem of Thersites the buffoon or Sisyphus the whoremaster or Batrachus the bawd speaking or doing anything, so praise the artificial managery of the poet, adapting the expressions to the persons, as withal to look on the discourses and actions so expressed as ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... loquacious if he talked as much as a discreet matron. [Footnote 5] The golden mean, then, must be defined by reason according to the particular circumstances of each case. But as Reason herself is to seek where she is not guided by Prudence, the mean of virtue must be defined, not by the reason of the buffoon Pantolabus, or of Nomentanus the spendthrift, but as a prudent man would define it, given ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Quinquart! Who could eclipse Robichon if his performance of the part equalled his conception of it? At the theatre that evening Quinquart followed Suzanne about the wings pathetically. He was garbed like a buffoon, but he felt like Romeo. The throng that applauded his capers were far from suspecting the romantic longings under his magenta wig. For the first time in his life he was thankful that the author hadn't ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... was called, on account of his small size, in spite of his years, which were not few. He was a tiny scrap of a man, nimble, snub-nosed, curly-haired, with a perennial smile on his infantile countenance, and little, mouse-like eyes. He was a great joker and buffoon; he was able to acquire any trick; he set off fireworks, snakes, played all card-games, galloped his horse while standing erect on it, flew higher than any one else in the swing, and even knew how to present ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... a tone of indifference which almost amounted to contempt. "Signor Formica! In what way can that buffoon ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... better test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars, served no doubt to colour all who had opposed him with a blacker shade than they deserved: but it is almost certain ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... as being dedicated to you, and by that tide adopted for yours, rather than to be fathered as my own. And it is a chance if there be wanting some quarrelsome persons that will shew their teeth, and pretend these fooleries are either too buffoon-like for a grave divine, or too satyrical for a meek christian, and so will exclaim against me as if I were vamping up some old farce, or acted anew the Lucian again with a peevish snarling at all ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... I am demeaning myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... considerable additions to the Appendix to General Preface. I am in the sentiments towards the public that the buffoon player expresses towards ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... will find many to match it. Another folio, Rochefort's History of the Caribby Islands, was lettered "Davies' Carriby Islands," because the title bore the statement "Rendered into English by John Davies." In another library, the great work of the naturalist, Buffon, was actually lettered "Buffoon's Natural History." Neither of these blunders was as bad as that of the owner of an elegant black-letter edition of a Latin classic, which was printed without title-page, like most fifteenth century books, and began at the top of the first leaf, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... he executed accordingly, exclaiming as he departed—"Oh, city and court! you by whom the expectations of the bold pretender are fulfilled, while the hopes of the modest labourer are destroyed; you who abundantly sustain the shameless Buffoon, while the worthy sage is left to die of hunger; I bid you farewell." That said, he proceeded to Flanders, where he finished in arms the life which he might have rendered immortal by letters, and died in ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... came up to the table and stole some wine, his eyes were wide open enough, and he said, 'Villain, don't you know that I am asleep only for Maecenas?'[107] But this is not perhaps so strange, considering Galba was a buffoon. But at Argos Nicostratus and Phayllus were great political rivals: so when King Philip visited that city, Phayllus thought if he prostituted his wife, who was very handsome, to the King, he would get from him some important office or place. And Nicostratus getting wind of this, and walking ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... with an almost passionate disdain. She was suddenly aware of an intense burning misery that seemed to gnaw into her very soul. Why had she come out with this buffoon, she wondered? Why had she come to the masquerade at all? She was utterly out of sympathy with its festive gaiety. A great and overmastering desire for solitude descended upon her. She turned ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... building, and which was governed by laws framed by himself. Aristippus and Epicurus were in the highest esteem here as the most polite, benevolent, and convivial of men. Even AEsop the Phrygian was here, whom they made use of by way of buffoon. Diogenes of Sinope had so wonderfully changed his manners in this place, that he married Lais the harlot, danced and sang, got drunk, and played a thousand freaks. Not one Stoic did I see amongst them; they, it seems, were ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... you find him here, who was indeed for his senseless humour of designing to govern—us'd no otherwise than as the Buffoon of the Family—takes upon him to call Don Quixot (whom the Authour imbellishes, with all manner of learning and good sense, bating his whimsical Chimaera of Knight Errantry,) Goodman Dulpate and Don Coxcomb. Well, however the Switcher here has escap'd for his usage of a Gentleman ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... marble walk which led to the rear. Up the winding steps to the front entrance, where swung the marvelous bronze doors which had stirred the imaginations of two continents, streamed the favored of the fashionable world. Among them Carmen saw many whom she recognized. The buffoon, Larry Beers, was there, swinging jauntily along with the bejeweled wife of Samson, the multimillionaire packer. Kane and his wife, and Weston followed. Outside the gates there was incessant chugging of automobiles, mingled with the shouted orders of the three policemen ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... distinctive Character in which they excel. This is most palpable in those Authors, whose Character consists in Humour. Let any one read Terence, as he is translated by Mr. Echard, and he will take him to have been a Buffoon: Whereas Terence never dealt in such a Kind of low Mirth. His true Character is, to have afforded to his Spectators and Readers the gravest, and, at the same Time, the most agreeable, most polite Entertainment of any antient Author now extant. ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... consideration, for faults of behaviour almost cease to shock us except among neighbours, or at most fellow-countrymen. Without knowing it, Jean found a fund of amusement in the witticisms and harangues of his old teacher, who united in himself the contradictory attributes of high-priest and buffoon. He was great at telling a story, and though his tales were beyond the child's intelligence, they did not fail to leave behind a confused impression of recklessness, irony, and cynicism. Mademoiselle Servien alone never relaxed ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... an exhibition of love—or, at least, not necessarily so. You might exhibit sensibility before a famous poet, or a gallant soldier, or a celebrated traveler—or, for that matter, before a remarkable buffoon, like Cagliostro, or a freak, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... dance, having then the diversion of the spectator, in the way of laughing, for its object, should preserve a moderately buffoon simplicity, and the dancer, aided by a natural genius, but especially by throwing as much nature as possible into his execution, may promise himself to amuse and please the spectator; even though he should not be very deep in the grounds of his art; provided he has a good ear, and some ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... good, I'm mad, stark raving mad, To have a Woman young, rich, beautiful, Just on the point of yielding to my Love, Snatcht from my Arms by such a Beast as this; An old ridiculous Buffoon, past Pleasure, Past Love, or any thing that tends that way; Ill-favour'd, ill-bred, and ill-qualify'd, With more Diseases than a Horse past Service; And only blest with Fortune and my Julia; For him, I say, this Miser, to obtain her, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... conspicuous figure in Tales of a Traveller, by Washington Irving. He is gentleman student, dancing buffoon, lover, poet, and author by turns, and nothing long unless it be a royally good ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... said, gruffly, "I dare say it is very funny, and anybody can laugh like a buffoon about such an arrangement; but how are they going to be safe on board a vessel whose officers cannot ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... the King's will and pleasure. Deputies were accordingly sent immediately, for whose return the bulk of the members stayed in the Great Chamber. I was informed that this was one trick among others concerted to ruin me, and, telling the Duc d'Orleans of it, he said that if the old buffoon, the Keeper of the Seals, was concerned in such a complication of folly and knavery, he deserved to be hanged by the side of Mazarin. But the sequel showed that I was not out in ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... soldier of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,—a buffoon addicted to choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more about ink than ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... naturally enough regard the personality of Punch with a good deal more than ordinary loyal sentiment and esprit de corps. It is interesting to observe the different views the artists have severally taken of it, for most of them in turn have attempted his portrayal. Brine regarded him as a mere buffoon, devoid of either dignity or breeding; Crowquill, as a grinning, drum-beating Showman; Doyle, Thackeray, and others adhered to the idea of the Merry, but certainly not uproarious, Hunchback; Sir John Tenniel showed ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts, and the effects of publick resentment, but has been caressed and patronised ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... and buffoon, was born about the year 1460, and educated at what he calls "Alma parens, O Cantabrigensis." Tutor to Prince Henry, afterward Henry VIII., he could boast, "The honour of England I lernyd to spelle." That he was highly esteemed ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body; those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... the countryside with a band of companions, and was finally pursued and captured in Lady Wood, outside the village. In the Ascensiontide sports the Earl wears a grotesque costume: a mask, and a smock padded with straw, and round his neck a chain of biscuits. He has with him a hobby-horse and buffoon covered with fantastic trappings, and carrying a small article called a "mapper" (which is conjectured to be a misreading for "snapper"), and representing the teeth and jaws of a horse. The Earl has also a donkey, decorated with flowers and with a necklace of ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... so various, that he seem'd to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.[268-4] ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... and I found, after not many days, that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank from my Lady's keeping-room to the antechamber, and thence to the servant's ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... to Jove, The same a Harlequin is now; The former was buffoon above, The latter is ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... "I have studied a buffoon this morning, I think," was the punning sneer with which M. de Lesdiguieres replied. But that he conceived himself witty, it is probable he would not have condescended to reply at all. "I don't ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... maid of Domremy, In thine innocence secure, Heed not what men say of thee, The buffoon and his jest impure! Nor care if thy name, young martyr, Be the star of thy country's story:— Mid the white-robed host of the heavens Thou hast more ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... began to address them in Greek, but his mistakes in the language were received with peals of laughter from the thoughtless mob. Unable to obtain a hearing, much less an answer, Postumius was leaving the theatre, when a drunken buffoon rushed up to him and sullied his white robe in the most disgusting manner. The whole theatre rang with shouts of laughter and clapping of hands, which became louder and louder when Postumius held up his sullied robe and showed it to the people. "Laugh on now," he cried, "but ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... reckon, ever'one here believes that yarn. It fits tew pat, not tew be true. So me an' Spike are th' true murderers, be we? Wal, this is sum unexpected an' s'prisin', ain't it Spike?" and he turned to his comrade, grinning and glaring like a huge buffoon; but a close observer might have noticed that his skin had whitened ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... (buffoon), she groaned, "didn't you swear to separate from Nalini, and have you not taken all your meals with him ever since? Is that the action ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... office,—"thus, then, this bookworm—this remnant of old heathen philosophy, who hardly believes, so God save me, the truth of the Christian creed, has topp'd his part so well that he forces his Emperor to dissemble in his presence. Beginning by being the buffoon of the court, he has wormed himself into all its secrets, made himself master of all its intrigues, conspired with my own son-in-law against me, debauched my guards,—indeed so woven his web of deceit, that ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... herself, signed under her own name, making an appointment for that night; but at the same time Galliard, claiming a former promise, drags his friend off to visit Euphemia. The intrigue is complicated by the ridiculous amours of two foolish travellers, Sir Signal Buffoon and Mr. Tickletext, a puritan divine, his tutor. These, unknown to each other, make assignations with the two bona robas by means of Petro, who dupes them thoroughly by his clever tricks, and pockets their money. Whilst Galliard and Sir ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... age,—that he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, and almost without notice. He was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... two serious old men; one was a model, a native of Frascati, with the face of a venerable apostle; the other, for contrast, looked like a buffoon and was the possessor of a grotesque nose, long, thin at the end and adorned ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... compose at most a merry fellow, and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man. Indiscriminate familiarity either offends your superiors, or else dubs you their dependent and led captain. It gives your inferiors just, but troublesome and improper claims to equality. A joker is near a-kin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... moving) fell on each others swords. But Eunus could not face this death. He took refuge in a cave, from which he was dragged with the last poor relics of his splendid court—his cook, his baker, his bath attendant and his buffoon. The Romans for some reason spared his life, or at least did not doom him to immediate death. He was kept a prisoner at Morgantia, where he died ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... heart; In mischief mighty, tho' but mean of size, And like the Tempter, ever in disguise. See him, with aspect grave and gentle tread, By slow degrees approach the sickly bed; Then at his Club behold him alter'd soon— The solemn doctor turns a low Buffoon, And he, who lately in a learned freak Poach'd every Lexicon and publish'd Greek, Still madly emulous of vulgar praise, From Punch's ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Kean, Macready, Kemble, and Siddons now belong to history and but yesterday Sir Henry Irving stood alone—the unique representative in England of the great tragic art.... In conveying irony, the English actor is in his element; in comic parts, he is simply grotesque. The buffoon may occasionally be found upon the English stage—the brilliant comedian never. In tragic parts he easily assumes an exaggerated gravity and solemnity; in sentimental roles he is ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Waiting Women, and all the Hurley-Burly of a great Court. Some few of the Commonalty also managed to squeeze themselves in—amongst others, your humble Servant, John Dangerous, who was now reckoned no better than a Rascal Buffoon. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... introducing lyrics was in vogue long before the playwrights of Shakespeare's time displayed their use so perfectly. From this point onwards the drama rings with the rough drinking songs, pious hymns, and sweet lyrics of the buffoon, the preacher, and the lover. Thus, turning haphazard to The Trial of Treasure, the Interlude immediately preceding Like Will to Like in the volume of Dodsley's Old English Plays, we find no less than eight songs. Like Will to Like has also eight. New Custom, the other Interlude ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... school of the priests when, on the festival of the goddess Mut, after various amusements they introduced the most famous buffoon in Egypt. This artist represented an unfortunate hero: when he commanded he was not obeyed, his anger was answered with laughter, and when, to punish those who made sport of him, he seized an axe, the axe broke in his hands. At last they let out a lion at him and when the defenseless hero began ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... wiseacres took our royal buffoon too seriously. Stylistically he was translated to the skies. [Sidenote: Cicero] Cicero[5] imputes to him "iocandi genus, ... elegans, urbanum, ingeniosum, facetum." [Sidenote: Aelius Stilo] Quintilian[6] quotes: "Licet Varro ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... claptrap tricks bring in as many pence as his patrons believed he might; again let alone when he had been lucky, and they were in a good humour with themselves and all the world. He acted as bear-leader and buffoon, villain and hero, alternately in public; while in private he was cook, drudge, messman, and menagerie manager for the rest of the party, for animals of some sort invariably formed part of the attractions of the troupe. Now it was a performing poodle, picked up somewhere in Mr. Harris's own ingenious ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... Worcester the Roman Catholic worship was violently interrupted. [106] At Bristol the rabble, countenanced, it was said, by the magistrates, exhibited a profane and indecent pageant, in which the Virgin Mary was represented by a buffoon, and in which a mock host was carried in procession. The garrison was called out to disperse the mob. The mob, then and ever since one of the fiercest in the kingdom, resisted. Blows were exchanged, and serious hurts inflicted. [107] The agitation was great in the capital, and greater in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sorry thought went rushing through me as I sat with an empty jug in my hand in a room that was sounding like a market-place. With a start I wakened up to find the landlord making a buffoon's attempt at a dance in the middle of the floor to the tune of the Jew-trump, a transparent trick to restore the good-humour of his roysterers, and the black man who had fetched the spae-wife was standing at my side surveying me closely ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... gross jests, which are found in the comedies of our time, and which are their meat rather than the spice, are the reasons why he who says 'Comedy' seems to speak of a buffoon's pastime. They wrong themselves who give to such gracious poesy a sense so unworthy. True comedy, properly regarded, has for its object the representation in divers personages of almost all the actions of familiar ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... seconded, one Rogers, a publican, got up and said he had something to say. There was indescribable confusion, some crying, "Turn him out;" others "Pitch into 'em, Bill." Bill Rogers was well known as the funny man in Cowfold, a half-drunken buffoon, whose wit, such as it was, was retailed all over the place; a man who was specially pleased if he could be present in any assembly collected for any serious purpose and turn it into ridicule. He got upon a chair, not far from where George ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... He, wearing his misery like a Caesar's toga, compared by this young buffoon to a kid who had been spanked! She had not noticed it. Ye Gods! ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... preserve even the feeblest image. In their midst Galiani, secretary of the Neapolitan Embassy, a clever dwarf; a genius, "a sort of Plato or Machiavelli with the spirit and action of a harlequin," inexhaustible in stories, an admirable buffoon, and an accomplished skeptic, "having no faith in anything, on anything or about anything,"[4206] not even in the new philosophy, braves the atheists of the drawing-room, beats down their dithyrambs with puns, and, with his perruque in his hand, sitting cross-legged on the chair on which he ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in particular, nearly all simple folks, had a desire to laugh, even when they were worn out with fatigue, which made a pretext of the slightest thing, and notably of danger. One of them, called Tailleur, a buffoon with the airs of an executioner's assistant, would call out at the first explosions of a ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... to be known by the names of mountains and rivers—in a fashion which recalled the tournament. There was also another personage, with a Dan Leno-like face and an extraordinary gift of contorting his legs, who played the buffoon, and gyrated round the dignified M.C., who remained unmoved while the audience laughed. It was evidently the right thing for the prizes—they were awarded at the end of each bout—to be presented as comically ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... then, avoiding the eye of the grand old saint, and hating myself as a buffoon, I continued, "My own conjecture is that something must have occurred to irritate the dramatist whilst he was writing that passage, and the expression slipped from his ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... who intoxicated his soldiers, not with glory, like the first Napoleon, but with wine; he will never be other than the pygmy tyrant of a great people. Grandeur, even in infamy, is utterly inconsistent with the calibre of the man. As dictator, he is a buffoon; let him make himself emperor, he will be grotesque. That will finish him. His destiny is to make mankind shrug their shoulders. Will he be less severely punished for that reason? Not at all. Contempt does not, in his case, mitigate anger; he will be hideous, and ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... wife to no buffoon; to no clumsy old clown; to no debauched, degraded parody of a man. And as for thy other rash threat, thou hast not the guts to put thy wishes into deeds, thou craven coward, for well ye know that Simon de Montfort would cut out thy foul heart ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and strict silence was observed. Each man had, therefore, time to commune with the spirits of those nine thousand miles away. It was not a time for the buffoon; they were faced with all the ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... surprise when I declare that this buffoon was an indefatigable student, a proficient in all the learned languages, an elegant poet, and, withal, a wit of no inferior class. It remains to discover why "the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... immense stage, an enormous pit all thrown into one vast room, surrounded by innumerable boxes, all rising, tier above tier—myriads of dancers, myriads of masks, myriads of spectators—so the scene appeared. Moreover, the Neapolitan is a born buffoon. Nowhere is he so natural as at a masquerade. The music, the crowd, the brilliant lights, the incessant motion are all intoxication to this ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... of his cravat he would say, "Well, Madame, is there anything new to-day? Citizen, what say they of Bonaparte? Your shop appears to be well supplied. You surely have a great deal of custom. What do people say of that buffoon; Bonaparte?" He was made quite happy one day when we were obliged to retire hastily from a shop to avoid the attacks drawn upon us by the irreverent tone in which Bonaparte ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... buffoon is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse; ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... heaven; the priest, in his alb and chasuble, dispensing of the blessings of the Pope; the judge, in his wig and bombazine, endeavouring to reconcile divine justice with the law's mundane majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the bride and bridegroom at the altar or before the mayor putting on their ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... fellowship. If there can be any great entertainment without a woman at it, let others look to it. This I am sure, there was never any pleasant which folly gave not the relish to. Insomuch that if they find no occasion of laughter, they send for "one that may make it," or hire some buffoon flatterer, whose ridiculous discourse may put by the gravity of the company. For to what purpose were it to clog our stomachs with dainties, junkets, and the like stuff, unless our eyes and ears, nay whole mind, were likewise ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... once or twice before sundown he permitted himself to ask natural questions concerning the old country, and to indulge in those genial gibes which the Englishman in the bush learns to expect from the indigenous buffoon. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... he had a lot of children, he called them all out of the house to check them over. To the joyful surprise of the visitors, there among them was little Eva—supposed to be eaten, and she even retained her right hand. Thus another newspaper libel upon the poor old black bear—the buffoon of the forest—was shown to be devoid of truth; yet that story was published in the Toronto papers, and, no doubt, was copied all ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... own mind would never have found by reason of its own gravitating power. He courted notoriety in a way that would have made him, if a poorer man, the toadying Boswell of some other Johnson giant, and, if very poor, the welcome buffoon of some gossiping journal, who would never weary of contortions, and who would brutify himself at the death, to kindle an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... no alterations in the original rude form of this poem, and as Thespis was the first that made any improvement in it, he was generally esteemed its inventor. Before him, tragedy was no more than a jumble of buffoon tales in the comic style, intermixed with the singing of a chorus in praise of Bacchus; for it is to the feasts of that god, celebrated at the time of the vintage, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew better than the Shavians, was ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... pomp which never forgets itself, and with an inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident. Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that Spenser never smiles. He not only smiles, with amusement or sly irony; he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote, and meant us to laugh at. He did not describe with a grave face the terrors and misadventures ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the Supreme. "Hear my iron word. When the buffoon-witted Ning rises from his congenial slough this shall be his lot: for sixty thousand ages he shall fail to find the path of his return, but shall, instead, thread an aimless flight among the frozen ambits of the outer stars, carrying a tormenting rain of fire ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... clothes had been sold." All applauded excepting Theophrastus, who made a grimace as behoved a well-bred man like him. The old man called to him, "Hi! tell me then what you have to be proud of? Not so much mouthing, you, who so well know how to play the buffoon and to lick-spittle the rich!" 'Twas thus he insulted each in turn with the grossest of jests, and he reeled off a thousand of the most absurd and ridiculous speeches. At last, when he was thoroughly ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Tarentum some sixty years before this time, according to his own statement saw the whole city drunk at the Dionysia, and that the burlesque farce, or "merry tragedy" as it was called, was created in Tarentum about the very time of the great Samnite war. This licentious life and buffoon poetry of the Tarentine fashionables and literati had a fitting counterpart in the inconstant, arrogant, and short-sighted policy of the Tarentine demagogues, who regularly meddled in matters with which they had ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... went on in this fashion But his incapacity for doing anything as well as his impassiveness eventually exasperated his relatives, and he became a laughing-stock, a sort of martyred buffoon, a prey given over to native ferocity, to the savage gaiety of ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... that day forth. I would be tempted to suppose that a gentleman must everywhere be first, even aboard a rover; but my birth is every whit as good as any Scottish lord's, and I am not ashamed to confess that I stayed Crowding Pat until the end, and was not much better than the crew's buffoon. Indeed, it was no scene to bring out my merits. My health suffered from a variety of reasons; I was more at home to the last on a horse's back than a ship's deck; and, to be ingenuous, the fear of the sea was constantly in my mind, battling with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to try his arts magic on great beasts and often meeting ludicrous failures therein; envious of the powers of others, and constantly striving to outdo them in what they do best; in short, little more than a malicious buffoon delighting in practical jokes, and abusing his superhuman powers for selfish and ignoble ends. But this is a low, modern, and corrupt version of the character of Michabo, bearing no more resemblance to his real and ancient ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... That fellow dressed like a buffoon, with the parrot on his wrist,—for what purpose is he ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... wretch—thou? What hast thou to do, but to play the stop-gap, where honest men keep aloof! To stretch or shrink seven times in an instant, like the butterfly on a pin? To be privy registrar in chief and clerk of the jordan? To be the cap-and-bell buffoon on which your master sharpens his wit? Well, well, let it be so. I will carry you about with me, as I would a marmot of rare training. You shall skip and dance, like a tamed monkey, to the howling of the damned; fetch, carry, and serve; and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... concern, and a rival magazine, to be called the Quarterly Review. The project was a daring one, in view of Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne, a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a place betrays in Scott's eminently sane and balanced mind a curious strain of impracticality, to say the least; ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... merry over the ivory, apes, and peacocks of existence. He seems less French than he is in his self-mockery, yet he is a true son of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted his homage. "All is relative," was his war-cry on ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... speeches, made repeatedly at the most inopportune junctures, and filled pell-mell with all the fancies and furies that happened at the moment to be whisking about in his head, were the consternation of Ministers. He was one part blackguard, people said, and three parts buffoon; but those who knew him better could not help liking him—he meant well; and he was really good-humoured and kind-hearted, if you took him the right way. If you took him the wrong way, however, you must look out for squalls, as the Duchess ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... repeated, caused Poinsinet to be fully convinced of his ugliness; he used to go about in companies, and take every opportunity of inveighing against himself; he made verses and epigrams against himself; he talked about "that dwarf, Poinsinet;" "that buffoon, Poinsinet;" "that conceited, hump-backed Poinsinet;" and he would spend hours before the glass, abusing his own face as he saw it reflected there, and vowing that he grew handsomer at every fresh epithet that ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mr. Fielding. "If it were possible to treat such a buffoon as you seriously, she wouldn't. I hope you are none the worse ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... that I am lying! For in order to please women, one must exhibit the thoughtlessness of a buffoon or all the wild passion of tragedy! They only laugh at us when we simply tell them that we love them! For my part, I consider those hyperbolical phrases which tickle their fancy a profanation of true love, so that it is no longer possible to give expression to it, especially when addressing ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... Cranmer was peculiarly fitted to organise the Church of England by being "unscrupulous, indifferent, a coward, and a time-server." James I. was given to "stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears," alternating between the buffoon and the pedagogue. James II. "amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek"; he was "a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving." The country gentleman of that age talked like "the most ignorant clown"; ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... with all his reading,' his mind muttered, as it were, to itself, 'is no better than an old woman; and that knave and buffoon, Mr. Apothecary Toole, looked queer, the spiteful dog, just to disquiet me. I wonder at Dr. Walsingham though. A sensible man would have laughed me into spirits. On my soul, I think he believes in dreams.' And Sturk laughed within himself scornfully. It ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... open; his face a kind of oblong quadrilateral containing features grotesquely drawn downward; his eyes, large and prominent, so turned as to show most of the sclerotic white of the eyeballs,—all were combined to present the buffoon in ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals and admirals, doctors and commissariat officers, and they submit to be patronised by him. Half-priest, half-buffoon, something of a Friar Tuck and something of a Louis XV. abbe, he is a sort of privileged person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in love with a curate and a cavalry officer. Monseigneur ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... endeavouring to make terms with him, and it will probably end in his recovering the Great Seal. When this is done they will have consummated their disgrace. Sheil said, 'The difficulty is how to deal with a bully and a buffoon,' and as they have succumbed to and bargained with the one, now they are going to truckle to the other; there is not one of them who has scrupled to express his opinion of Brougham, but let us see if he ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... conviviality demanded very unusual capacity both of head and of stomach. To be admired by Bedford was in itself a patent of dishonor, but it was a profitable patent to Rigby. The Duke, who was accused at times of a shameful parsimony, was generous to profusion towards the bloated buffoon who was able and willing to divert him, and from that hour Rigby's pockets never wanted their ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the general absurdity that such a situation creates. It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep, underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: "I never wrote a serious word ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... the SPRUCH-SPRECHER often condescended to follow up the jester's witticisms with an explanation, to render them more obvious to the capacity of the audience, so that his wisdom became a sort of commentary on the buffoon's folly. And sometimes, in requital, the HOFF-NARR, with a pithy jest, wound up the conclusion of the orator's ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Tigellius, the flattering musical buffoon so well described by Horace, thus lashes his country in a letter to Fabius Gallus: ‘Id ego in lucris pono non ferre hominem pestilentiorem putriâ suâ.’ Again, writing to his brother: ‘Remember,’ says he, ‘though in perfect health, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Second Defence for the English People in reply to an infamous Book entitled 'Cry of the King's Blood against the English Parricides.' To which is added A Public Testimony of Alexander Morus, Churchman, and Professor of Sacred Literature, in reply to the Calumnies of John Milton, Buffoon. Printed at the Hague by Adrian Ulac, 1654.") The reprint of Milton's Defensio Secunda fills 128 pages of the volume; More's appended Fides Publica, or Public Testimony, in reply, is in larger type and fills 129 ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... came down, closely shorn, about half an inch below his ear. "A very common sort of individual," he said of himself, as he looked in the glass when Mary Lawrie had been already twelve months in the house; "but then a man ought to be common. A man who is uncommon is either a dandy or a buffoon." ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... been moulded in bronze and sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe, and had then inspired surprise and mistrust. People suspected the Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and famished, of having tried to make fun of people. Disciples of Dr. Gall, whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious. They did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... hareem, and found my old friend very poorly, but spent a pleasant evening with him, his young wife—a Georgian slave whom he had married,—his daughter by a former wife—whom he had married when he was fourteen, and the female dwarf buffoon of the Valideh Pasha (Ismail's mother) whose heart I won by rising to her, because she was so old and deformed. The other women laughed, but the little old dwarf liked it. She was a Circassian, and seemed clever. You see how the 'Thousand and One Nights' are quite true and real; how great ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... For some reason he had come to the conclusion that the less the settlers knew of pleasure the better, and therefore he laid down the law that all strolling popular entertainers should be forbidden to enter the holy city. No public buffoon ever cracked his jokes at Herrnhut. No tight-rope dancer poised on giddy height. No barrel-dancer rolled his empty barrel. No tout for lotteries swindled the simple. No juggler mystified the children. No cheap-jack cheated the innocent maidens. No quack-doctor sold his nasty pills. No melancholy ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... soil of low meadows, and damp hollows beside the road; but moisture it must have to fill its nectary and to soften the ground for the easier transit of its creeping rootstock. Imaginative eyes see what appears to them the gaping (ringens) face of a little ape or buffoon (mimulus) in this common flower whose drolleries, such as they are, call forth the only applause desired - the buzz of insects that become pollen-laden ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... interest in England; he was never tired of reading English books, of being polite to English travellers, and of doing his best, in the intervals of more serious labours, to destroy the reputation of that deplorable English buffoon, whom, unfortunately, he himself had been so foolish as first to introduce to the attention of his countrymen. But it is curious to notice how, as time went on, the force of Voltaire's nature inevitably carried him further ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... with some one who regarded him as a hero. To Count Gregory Erdey she extended a smiling salutation from afar, which he requited by saluting her with his hat in one hand and his wig in another, which provoked a roar of Homeric laughter from the assembled guests. The young buffoon had had his head clean shaved in order that his hair might grow all the stronger, so that his bald pate quite scared the weak-nerved members of the company. The young housewife curtsied low in humble silence ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... here, noblesse, have been recalled from the army, and replaced by officers chosen by the soldiers themselves, [Under the rank of field-officers.] whose affections are often conciliated by qualities not essentially military, though sometimes professional. A buffoon, or a pot-companion, is, of course, often more popular than a disciplinarian; and the brightest talents lose their influence when put in competition with a head that can bear a ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... me, Cromwell, with equal patience on matters more important. We all have our sufferings: why increase one another's wantonly? Be the blood Scotch or English, French or Italian, a drummer's or a buffoon's, it carries a soul upon its stream; and every soul has many places to touch at, and much business to perform, before it reaches its ultimate destination. Abolish the power of Charles; extinguish ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... members of the tribunal demanded "who the boy was with the bleeding nose?" and "why were halberdiers admitted?" Veronese replied that they were the sort of servants a rich and magnificent host would have about him. He was then asked why he had introduced the buffoon with a parrot on his hand. He replied that he really thought only Christ and His Apostles were present, but that when he had a little space over, he adorned it with imaginary figures. This defence of the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... as supple in the movements of his joints as any clown on the stage. He imitated every movement we made, and burlesqued them to a very high degree, causing great laughter to his companions and us. He seems to be the buffoon of the tribe. The other natives delighted in making sport of him, by ridiculing the shortness of his stature and laughing at him ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... Porphyrius, more and more at his ease, without ceasing to indulge in his little laugh, whilst continuing his perambulation about the room. "You may be right. God has given me a face which only arouses comical thoughts in others. I'm a buffoon. But excuse an old man's cackle. You, Rodion Romanovitch, you are in your prime, and, like all young people, you appreciate, above all things, human intelligence. Intellectual smartness and abstract rational deductions entice ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... he repeated, with glistening eyes, "you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... her in his soul. Of all injured vanities, that of the reproved buffoon is the most savage; and when grave issues are involved, these petty stabs become unbearable. But Gondremark was a man of iron; he showed nothing; he did not even, like the common trickster, retreat because he had presumed, but held to his point bravely. 'Madam,' he said, 'if, as you say, he prove ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 5th only yesterday, while I had letters of the 8th from London. Doth the post dabble into our letters? Whatever agreement you make with Murray, if satisfactory to you, must be so to me. There need be no scruple, because, though I used sometimes to buffoon to myself, loving a quibble as well as the barbarian himself (Shakspeare, to wit)—'that, like a Spartan, I would sell my life as dearly as possible'—it never was my intention to turn it to personal, pecuniary account, but to bequeath it to a friend—yourself—in the event of survivorship. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... of ostensible gold representing the five milliards paid by France, a gallery of astonished wax soldiers representing the Franco-Prussian war, a cook-shop with "mythologic" confectionery. Farther on, in the Theatre Casti, was exposed the "renowned buffoon Peppino," breveted by His Majesty the "king of Egypt;" then came the Chiarini Theatre; then the Theatre Adrien Delille, an enchantingly pretty structure, where receptions were given by a little creature who should have sat under a microscope: she was "the Princess Felicia, aged thirteen, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... play the fool; Alluding to the common comparison of human life to a stage-play. So that he desires his may be the fool's or buffoon's part, which was a constant character in the old farces; from whence came the phrase, to ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... of his wife, and it turned out to be the last; but from that moment the older man had something of dignity in the eyes of this younger man, who had merely judged of him by his little foibles and eccentricities, and would have been ready to dismiss him contemptuously as a buffoon. There was something, then, behind that powerful face, with its deep-cut lines, its heavy eyebrows and piercing and sometimes sad eyes, besides a mere liking for tricks of childish diplomacy. Lavender began to have some respect for Sheila's father, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... The shouts of laughter proceeding from their corner of the house announced that business was over, and that chaff and fun, so dear to the heart of every Kanowit, was being carried on with great gusto. As we arrived and stood by the group, one of their number (evidently a privileged buffoon) begged to be allowed to speak to the Resident. "You remember that gun, Resident," said he, "you gave me?" (This was an old muzzle-loader for which Mr. H. had had no further use.) "Oh yes," was the reply; "what luck have you had with it?" "Oh, wonderful," said the ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... be known to the excellent managers of that excellent institution, that a more worthy, modest, sober, and loyal man does not exist in his majesty's dominions than this distinguished poet, whom some of his waggish friends have taken up the absurd fancy of exhibiting in print as a sort of boozing buffoon; and who is now, instead of revelling in the license of tavern-suppers and party politics, bearing up, as he may, against severe and unmerited misfortunes, in as dreary a solitude as ever nursed the melancholy of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... Lecoq's brain. He determined to prove its truth. Disguised as a clown, he attended the fancy-dress ball, and in the character of a mountebank collected a group of ladies and gentlemen around him while he related with the inimitable skill of a buffoon a romantic narrative. To most of the people present it was simply an amusing story, but to the count and Lagors and Madame Fauvel, who were among the listeners, it seemed something much more, for Lecoq dressed out his theory ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton |
