"Comedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Otis Yeere At the Pit's Mouth A Wayside Comedy The Hill of Illusion A Second-rate Woman Only a Subaltern In the Matter of a Private The Enlightenments of ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... since the adventure, but his ideas—without his knowing it—absolutely coincided with hers. He, too, was quite sure that no common footpad had engineered their daring attack. Positive knowledge of the money and its destination had been the fountain from which had sprung the comedy of the masked highwayman and his little band of robbers. Maurice mentally reckoned that there must have been at least half a dozen of these bravos—of the sort that in these times were easily enough hired in any big city to play any ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... am forwarding a copy of an original three-act comedy, entitled, Men and Munitions. As the interest is largely topical I should he much obliged if you could let me have your verdict upon it with as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... do not often hear about in the Banda Oriental," he said. "But the English know everything—even the secrets of a flower. They are also able to do most things. Did you ever, sir botanist, take part in acting a comedy?" ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... be better for a lady or two Then, have we our theatre: Farce, comedy, and the buskin, take their turns to help along the time. You fellow, that you see lying on the fore-topsail-yard like an indolent serpent basking on the branch of a tree, will 'roar you as gently as any sucking dove!' And here is ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... thoughts of men printed and bound, than with the urgent raw material from which those thoughts arise. Revelation, authority—these were still his watchwords; and in face of them even the harmless spectacle of a country neighbourhood at play, let alone the spectacle of the human comedy generally, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of the serious-minded, the mystification of the incredulous, the delight of sensation-mongers, and the baffled fury of Grandier. So far the play, if melodramatic, had not approached the tragic. Sometimes it degenerated to the broadest farce comedy. Thus, on one occasion when the devil was being read out of the mother superior, a crashing sound was heard and a huge black cat tumbled down the chimney and scampered about the room. At once the cry was raised that the devil ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... mixture of comedy and tragedy in the events of those days. The miracle-play alternated with the pillory, and the sight-seers went from the burning of a heretic in the morning to see the new athletic games, introduced by the Spaniards, in the afternoon in Palace ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This recognition once made, the order of the world and the distribution of affairs and times, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the Interrogation Room was named Alexis Brubitsch. The other two, who were presumably waiting separately in other rooms, were Ivan Borbitsch and Vasili Garbitsch. The collection sounded, to Malone, like a seedy musical-comedy firm of lawyers: Brubitsch, Borbitsch and Garbitsch. He could picture them dancing gaily across a stage while the strains of music followed them, waving legal forms and telephones ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... move. Pougatcheff drew back his hand: "His lordship is stupefied with joy; raise him up," said he. I was at liberty. Then I witnessed the continuation of the infamous comedy. ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... the chairman, I said that the manner in which the "California" voted seemed to cause some of those present considerable amusement and that, individually, I didn't see anything in it that was funny; that it was more of a tragedy than a comedy, and that it was a solemn and serious matter for the company of which I was the representative to go on record for the second time, publicly, as pledging itself to pay so tremendous an amount of money out of the ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks
... growing estrangement came about by accident,—one of those chance occurrences that affect our lives more than years of ordered effort,—and it came in an inverted form of a situation old to comedy. Cressida had been on the road for several weeks; singing in Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Paul, then up into Canada and back to Boston. From Boston she was to go directly to Chicago, coming down on the five o'clock train and taking the eleven, over the Lake Shore, for the West. By her schedule ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... beside Monseigneur de Zollern, whose fine head had dropped forward on his breast. He was asleep; and Madame de Ruth realised, with a sigh, that her beloved had grown old; that her youth had vanished too, and even the joy of observing the tragi-comedy of human nature palled for her at that moment, and she felt herself to be old and lonely. At length the music ceased, and was followed by that insolent, half-hearted applause which it is the privilege of the truly cultured audience to ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... fellows, and they accept a situation which would rouse any continental gendarme to heroic indignation. Mayors, Aldermen, and Justices of the Peace are comic, and take it not quite so well. Beadles were so wholly dedicated to the purposes of comedy that I suppose they found their position unendurable and went to earth; at any rate it is very difficult to catch one in ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... method of producing fire does not antedate the more primitive methods such as striking quartz or rubbing wooden sticks, because the materials required are not readily found or prepared, but it is of very remote origin. Aristophanes in his comedy "The Clouds," which is a satire aimed at the science and philosophy of his period (488-385 B. C.), mentions the "burning lens." Nearly every one is familiar with an achievement attributed to Archimedes in which he destroyed the ships ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... afraid—We are afraid— You are afraid—They are afraid—For as death has been officially declared "an endless sleep" any crime is possible; the mob have no fear of hell, and as for the guillotine, it is their opera and their perpetual comedy. Very soon these things must bring on France the chastisement of the Lord; and I shall not be sorry ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... with the face of an Abbe Maury like the seven cardinal sins. Comfortable looking Mr. Dodd of the prudential committee, with his chin-tuft of yellow beard, is cast for the part of the villain, but will play it badly; he would have been better suited to a comedy part. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... watching the delicate little scene, smiling drowsily at the Grand Duke's tender comedy. No one was looking at the two in the curtained recess. Her hand was in his, her head sank slowly toward his inviting shoulder; her heavy lids drooped lower and lower, refusing to obey the slender will that argued against complete surrender. At last her soft, ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the players. Some, though not many, of the fashionable stars would serve, whilst there are numbers of really able actresses and actors who have proved their ability to represent modern comedy, but owing to the strange policy of managers are rarely employed by the ordinary theatre—in London. In several cases the policy may be sound, since the regular fare of the fashionable houses as a rule demands a showy, but insincere, style out of the range, or at least the ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... knowledge of bird-life. But when I see a bird pecking and fluttering angrily at my window-pane, as I now and then do in spring, apparently under violent pressure to get in, I am witnessing a significant comedy in bird-life, one that illustrates the limits of animal instinct. The bird takes its own reflected image in the glass for a hated rival, and is bent on demolishing it. Let the assaulting bird get a glimpse of the inside of the empty ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... by Cauchon to preach in this 'terrible comedy,' as Michelet calls this farce of the Maid's abjuration. For text the monk selected the fifteenth chapter of Saint John's gospel: 'The branch,' etc. Erard showed in his discourse how Joan had fallen from one sin into another, till she had at length separated herself from the Church. ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... for new and more varied spectacles. Greek athletes now made their appearance (for the first time in 568) alongside of the native wrestlers and boxers. Of the dramatic exhibitions we shall speak hereafter: the transplanting of Greek comedy and tragedy to Rome was a gain perhaps of doubtful value, but it formed at any rate the best of the acquisitions made at this time. The Romans had probably long indulged in the sport of coursing hares and hunting foxes in presence of the public; now these innocent hunts ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... far more natural in everything he attempted; Mrs. Porter surpassed him in passionate tragedy. Cibber and O'Brien were what Garrick could never reach, coxcombs and men of fashion. Mrs. Clive is at least as perfect in low comedy.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... outstretched hands, two berets doffed, two picturesque giants bowing low, with a Frenchman's grace—this, on the Trouville sands, was the last act of this little comedy of our landing on the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... monument to Death. The girl was so perplexed by the change in her statue that for the moment she forgot the ruin of her own life. She saw that the smiling face was but a mask, held in place by the curving of the left arm over it. Life, she realized now, was made up of tragedy and comedy, and he who sees but the smiling face, sees but the half of life. The girl hurried on to the bridge, sobbing quietly to herself, and looked down at the grey river water. The passers-by paid no attention to her. Why, she wondered, ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... Comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre, are all, ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... is not sufficient here), but still better when he applies the comparison of a stage play, in his second book on Nature (as Plutarch quotes it himself). There he says that there are sometimes portions in a comedy which are of no worth in themselves and which nevertheless lend grace to the whole poem. He calls these portions epigrams or inscriptions. We have not enough acquaintance with the nature of the ancient comedy for full understanding of this passage from Chrysippus; ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... matter of course that the poet was greatly cheered by the acceptance of his play, and he immediately set to work on another, Olaf Liljekrans; but this he put aside when Kaempehoeien practically failed. He wrote a satirical comedy called Norma. He endeavored to get certain of his works, dramatic and lyric, published in Christiania, but all the schemes fell through. It is certain that 1851 began darkly for the young man, and that ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... associations as this under the regime of the Fermier General and Madame Dupin are those of an altogether peaceful and homelike abode. In his Confessions Rousseau says: "We amused ourselves greatly in this fine spot. We made a great deal of music and acted comedies. I wrote a comedy, in fifteen days, entitled L'Engagement Temeraire, which will be found amongst my papers; it has not other merit than that of being lively. I composed several other little things: amongst others a poem entitled, L'Allee de Sylvie, from the name of ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... published, it bore the subordinate title of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... mudbake back to Beerjand from this point, and for these two hopeful accomplices to present themselves before me as about ready to depart, and so demand backsheesh. This little farce is duly played shortly after our arrival; it is a genuine piece of light comedy, acted on the strangely realistic stage of the lonely desert, to which the full round moon just rising above the eastern horizon. These advances are met on my part by broad intimations that if they continue to act as ridiculously ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... time out of mind, has always entitled the operator to that distinction. The predecessor of Dun was Gregory Brandon, from whom the gallows was called the Gregorian tree, by which name it is mentioned in the prologue to Mercurius Pragmaticus, tragi-comedy acted at Paris, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... the good sense to entrust him with some large mural decorations, in which he unfolded the scale of his sparkling colours, and affirmed his spirit, his fancy and his dreamy art. Cheret's harmonies remain secrets; he uses them for the representation of characters from the Italian comedy, thrown with fiendish verve upon a background of a sky, fiery with the Bengal lights of a fairy-like carnival, and he strangely intermingles the reality of the movements with the most arbitrary fancy. ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... said Elizabeth, with a smile, "for I have saved you. Ah, I should never have believed that the playing of comedy was so easy, but I tell you I have played one in a masterly manner. Fear was my teacher; it taught me to appear so innocent, to implore so affectingly, that Anna herself was touched. Ah, and I wept whole streams of tears, I tell you. That quite disarmed the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... a commission which admirably suited the tastes and spirits of my worthy St. Clair, to whom, you will have observed, I had accustomed myself to talk with the peculiar familiarity which the old French comedy ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... great epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... part of the comedy was cut short by the lady discontinuing the correspondence and concealing ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... of the Keeps was completely satisfactory, and for the purposes of their social comedy the stage-setting was perfect. The house was one they had rented from a man of charming taste and inflated fortune; and with it they had taken over his well-disciplined butler, his pictures, furniture, family silver, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... almost the same thing as to love Moliere; it is, to love nature, the whole of nature, humanity ingenuously depicted, a representation of the grand comedy "of a hundred different acts," unrolling itself, cutting itself up before our eyes into a thousand little scenes with the graces and freedoms that are so becoming, with weaknesses also, and liberties which are never found in the simple, manly genius of the master of masters. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the last act that was to blot out poor Sam Jedfoot's memory from the minds of all the hands took place, the skipper ordering the usual auction of the dead man's effects to be held on the fo'c's'le; when, such is the comedy of life, the very men who were so indignant about the captain shooting him a few hours before now cut jokes about the poverty of the darkey's kit, when his sea-chest was opened and its contents put up for ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... heathen poets was but an episode, the religious element of the poem, as the 'Descent into Hades,' the 'Wanderings through Elysium,' etc., etc., ends by absorbing the entire work after the advent of Christianity. The 'Divine Comedy,' the 'Paradise Lost,' and the 'Messiah,' form a magnificent Christian trilogy, of which the scene is almost always in a supernatural sphere, and in which the principal actor is—the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... he could survey the inmates without attracting their attention. With revolver in one hand and dagger in the other he noiselessly entered the box and stood directly behind the President who was enjoying the humor of the comedy. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... absorbed in that search as he supposed. About Max, half- sitting on the corner of the study table, about Connie, with her hands loosely clasped before her, there was a certain air of quiet detachment, as of those who politely look on at some interesting comedy, but who, as soon as courtesy permits, will return to affairs of ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... New York business man, his pretty sweetheart, his sentimental stenographer, and his fashionable sister are all mixed up in a misunderstanding that surpasses anything in the way of comedy in years. A story with a ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... which had been the cause of the whole upset, and presented it quite innocently to Lispeth, who, not knowing that she was receiving stolen goods, thanked her and tied the parcel. Ingred, who had watched the whole comedy, laughed, but did ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... over them all as death? What could such advantages accomplish taken as actual moving causes of a human race, innumerable because constantly renewed, which unceasingly moves, strives, struggles, grieves, writhes, and performs the whole tragi-comedy of the history of the world, nay, what says more than all, perseveres in such a mock-existence as long as each one possibly can? Clearly this is all inexplicable if we seek the moving causes outside the figures and conceive the human race as ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... bethought me that this might be his way of carrying out his plan; if so, I could not help admiring his ingenuity, albeit still decidedly annoyed with him for the powerful realism with which he was playing his little comedy. ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... of Athene of the Parasol, or of beautiful slaves; to contribute through the arts to the adornment of life, yet perhaps also in part to weaken it, relaxing ancient austerity. Gradually, his rough country feasts will be outdone by the feasts of the town; and as comedy arose out of those, so these will give rise to tragedy. For his entrance upon this new stage of his career, his coming into the town, is from the [40] first tinged with melancholy, as if in entering ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... shot back into a lumber-room of my brain and the door locked. He didn't seem to be a creature of the living present, but a distant memory on which I could look calmly. I thought a good deal about my battalion and the comedy of my present position. You see I was getting better, for I called it comedy now, ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... relate to external nature, not at all to the inner nature of man. A good number of our romances and of our tragedies, particularly those that bear the name of dramas—a sort of compromise between tragedy and comedy—a good number also of those highly-appreciated family portraits, belong to this class. The only effect of these works is to empty the lachrymal duct, and soothe the overflowing feelings; but the mind comes back from them empty, and the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... time they happened to be rehearsing a musical comedy, and Hans, without any knowledge of the subject, took up his position at the conductor's desk and handled the baton with great vigour and remarkable skill. I felt safe as far as he was concerned, and ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... if the scene was affecting, the invalids began to be more affected by the tartar emetic. This was the third act of the comedy. The plot had been thoroughly ventilated; the last act exhibited the perfect fidelity of my Tokrooris, in whom I subsequently ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... than a child or neighbor) is offered for a sudden judgment—to sink or swim upon a first impression—and its christening is an especial peril. I have fretted for a month to find a title for my comedy. ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... for the joy he took in communing with nature. How S. Francis found God in the sun and the air, the water and the stars, we know by his celebrated hymn; and of Dante's acute observation, every canto of the 'Divine Comedy' is witness. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... great many divisions; for of tragic, comic, epic, lyric, and also of dithyrambic poetry, which has been more cultivated by the Latins, each kind is very different from the rest. Therefore in tragedy anything comic is a defect, and in comedy anything tragic is out of place. And in the other kinds of poetry each has its own appropriate note, and a tone well known to those who understand the subject. But if any one were to enumerate many classes of orators, describing some as ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... comedy is the romance of the Prince of Denmark, which, unlike other romances, begins after his marriage: with Polonia, daughter of Horatio, who had been previously engaged to both Rosenstern and Guildencranz. Hamlet, by joining a troupe of strolling players, offends his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... Wedgwood was tragically in love—the word was used advisedly. One can play comedy; two are required for melodrama; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the officers of the ship and of the artillery, and went off in high style, applauded, as it deserved to be applauded, with the loudest acclamations. The quarter-deck of a British line-of-battle ship has often enough been a stage for the exhibition of bloody tragedies; but to witness a comedy and a farce upon that stage, and in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, was delightful from its very singularity. When the performance came to an end, the stage was knocked down, the seats removed, and everything cleared for dancing. The music was excellent, being composed ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... re-formed, and the two Bailies left the ticket-office together, one of them waving a regretful farewell to his sympathetic congregation, the boys executed a war-dance of triumph; for the contrast between the twin brethren afforded just that kind of comedy which appeals to a boy's heart, and because they had an instinct that the incident would be of service in the war between the Bailie and the Seminary, which had gone on for a year and ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... was the end. Another twenty minutes and the hotel would loom up before them, and the little farce, comedy, or tragedy, whichever it might be, would be finished. The curtain would fall, and the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... of its lack. Mark Twain could be humorous at the death of his dearest friend, but in such a way as to put a blessing into the heart of the bereaved. Humor in music has the same possibilities. But its quantity has a serious effect on its quality, "inverse ratio" is a good formula to adopt here. Comedy has its part, but wit never. Strauss is at his best in these lower rooms, but his comedy reminds us more of the physical fun of Lever rather than "comedy in the Meredithian sense" as Mason suggests. Meredith is a little too deep or too subtle for Strauss—unless ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... dismiss you from the command of my army, I could not but admire your sturdy honesty. Had I been able to graft your love of truth upon some of my councillors, what a valuable group of advisers might I have gathered round me. But we have had enough of comedy and now tragedy sets in. Those who are traitors to their ruler must not be surprised if a double traitor is one of their number. Why am I here? Why do two hundred mounted and armed men surround this doomed chalet? Miserable ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... The Indian jugglers are practising upon us, I suspect. You are no more like the same person who played sparkling comedy and sang passionate tragedy than this bamboo stick ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... no sense of humor; and if you joke with him he'll think youre insulting him on purpose. Mind: it's not that he doesnt see a joke: he does; and it hurts him. A comedy scene makes him sore all over: he goes away black and blue, and pitches into the ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... Street, Dublin, with no knowledge of what his stage experience had been, I accepted him at once for what he was, a finished "character" actor of poise and confidence, a dignified figure for all his stature and his predilection for comedy, and the possessor of a speaking voice whose natural pleasantness he had made into something higher than pleasantness by his art in the use of it, if it never attained the resonance and nobility of phrasing of that of his brother, Mr. Frank J. Fay. It ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... musical comedy point of view," she said, "he was the most important person in London. He is the emperor of stage-land. He can make the fortune of any girl in London who is reasonably good-looking and who can sing ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... those who in his college days followed and courted and kept pace with Jack Craven, and knew his smile, would have expected from him anything other than seriousness. He appeared to himself to be enacting a kind of grim comedy, exile as he was in a foreign land, among people of ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... always mercenary, and were the chief agents in promoting a match, if it were for their own family's advantage. No doubt Uncle Francis had arranged the whole affair with this Lady Tancred in the first instance, and she, Zara, would not be required to keep up the comedy, as with the uncle and cousins. She decided she would be quite frank with her if the occasion required, and if she should, by chance, make the same insinuation of the continuance of the Tancred race ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... laughing—who has been to seek out Romeo, and brought back news of him. In As You Like It, Rosalind's bright humor ripples and laughs like a silver brook through the glades of Ardennes, and trickles gently even into the epilogue: in this lively comedy—so much lighter and easier than the heavy tragedy we are discussing too—love and despair never come to overlay and destroy the arch humor. If there be any defect in the performance of the banished princess, it must still remain, like Orlando's verses, tacked to some tree in the forest, but, unlike ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... knicknacks of the Catherine period; on the wall the well-known picture of a flaxen-haired girl with a dove on her breast and eyes turned upwards; on the table a vase of fresh roses. You see how minutely I describe it. In that drawing-room, on that terrace, was rehearsed all the tragi-comedy of my love. The colonel's wife herself was an ill-natured old dame, whose voice was always hoarse with spite—a petty, snappish creature. Of the daughters, one, Vera, did not differ in any respect from the common run of young ladies ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... these times. This world of ours has become very sophisticated. It has suffered itself to be exploited till there is no external wonder left. Retroactively the demand for mystery, which is the very soul of interest, must find new expression. Thus we turn inward for fresh thrills to the human comedy, and outward to the realm of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... rather than their resemblances. The one strikes us as essentially the sane; the other, even in his first books, reveals that lack of mental balance which was to terminate in insanity. The one is a genial sceptic; the other is a fanatic dogmatist. To Montaigne life is a comedy; to his disciple life is a tragedy. The one philosophizes with a smile; the other, to use his own expression, philosophizes with a hammer. The one is a Conservative; the other is a herald of revolt. The one is constitutionally moderate and temperate; the other is ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... what dowdies they would be. Poor old Anne, you must know she had a turn for finery, only she never knew how to gratify it. To see the contortions of her crinolines was the delight of all the grammar school. It was a regular comedy for them to see her get into our pew edgeways, and once unconsciously she carried off a ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be a rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will thicken with citizens of all ages and sexes and nations; and if you will then seek some large centre for the cinematographic dissemination of the election news, you will find yourself one of a multitude gloating on the scenes of comedy and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to stay your impatience for the returns. Along the curbstones are stationed wagons for the sale of the wind and string instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... first novel Hardy lightened the tragedy of life with rare comedy. These comic interludes are furnished by a choice collection of rustics, who discuss the affairs of the universe and of their own township with a humor that is infectious. In this work Hardy surpasses George Eliot and all other novelists of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... bill of the play. I knew only a few of its waltzes and I drank in the comedy and the pretty music like one desperately athirst. Kyril's girl, the Dolores, was very chic and looked ravishingly pretty, and brother-in-law Max isn't the ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... Shakespeare only by approaching him on foot. He must be studied in fragments. His plays, if I may be pardoned for coining a word, need not an omnigraph, but monographs. Let Shakespeare be, and give eye and ear to his history, comedy, tragedy; and when we have done with them, one by one, we shall discover how the aggregated mass climbs taller than highest mountains. This method, in tentative fashion, I propose to apply in some studies in this volume, or other volumes, believing that the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... In an old comedy, which used to delight our fore-fathers, the hero, Felix O'Callaghan, defines the practice of medicine as "the art of amusing the patient while Nature performs the cure." In that sentence, the dramatist (unwittingly perhaps) embodied a great truth. Nature, and Nature only, can effect ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... worshiped, as Saturn, Juno and Hercules were in the past; with perhaps dreadful and bloody rites like those of the Carthaginians and ancient Mexicans. And so, step by step, mankind will re-enact the great human drama, which begins always with a tragedy, runs through a comedy, and ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Secrets unsuited to that opaline Surface of things which laughs along thy scrolls. There throng the people: how they come and go Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb,—see,—On Piazza, Calle, under Portico And over Bridge! Dear king of Comedy, Be honoured! Thou that didst love Venice so, Venice, and we who love her, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... should be upon his marriage night," he said, with an astounding impudence, and there were some who tittered in the crowd behind me. "Let me again beg your excellency and your worthinesses to pass to judgment, and so conclude this foolish comedy." ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... no more. He, for his part, was amazed at her being so little disturbed, so rational. He had expected pretty little flirting ways, refusals which meant yes, a whole coquettish comedy of love chequered by prawn-fishing in the splashing water. And it was all over; he was pledged, married with twenty words. They had no more to say about it since they were agreed, and they now sat, both somewhat embarrassed ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... of confidence. This vice creeps on by very slow degrees, till, at last, it becomes an ungovernable passion, swallowing up every good and kind feeling of the heart. The gambler, as pourtrayed by REGNARD, in a comedy the translation of which into English resembles the original much about as nearly as Sir JAMES GRAHAM'S plagiarisms resembled the Registers on which they had been committed, is a fine instance of the contempt and scorn to which gaming at last ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... October 6, 1669, is nothing but a farce. But Moliere excels in farce as well as in higher comedy, and 'Monsieur de Pourceaugnac' is one of the best of its kind. The attacks upon the doctors of the time are not exaggerated. Moliere acted the part of Mr. ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... opening whatsoever, they could try to gain an entrance by surprise, and then, if the bearer of the spit succeeded in placing his bird in front of the fire, that constituted a taking possession of the hearth-stone, the comedy was at an end, and ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... wall, his mouth dropping open, his whole face frozen like a face caught in a snapshot unawares to a sudden glare of immense and ludicrous astonishment. Then he began to give at the knees like a man who has been smitten with pie in a custard-comedy and Oliver recovered from his surprise at both of them sufficiently to step in and catch him as he ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... reality which underlies our short existence on earth. To Wolfram, and to many a poet of his time, the human tragedy of this world presented the same unreal, transitory, and transparent aspect which we find again in Dante's "Divine Comedy." Everything points to another world. Beauty, love, virtue, happiness,—everything, in fact, that moves the heart of the poet,—has a hidden reference to something higher than this life; and the highest object ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... fright, did not move from his place, and it was with some difficulty that "the Bard" and "Gibs" brought him back to a normal condition and induced him to assist in preparing the fowl which had played the part of Joe Locke's head, in the little comedy, for the belated feast—which was merrily partaken of, but without the guest ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... number of verses he could recite was prodigious, and what he remembered of the parts of playes, which he would also act; and when seeing a Plautus in one's hand, he ask'd what booke it was, and being told it was comedy, and too difficult for him, he wept for sorrow. Strange was his apt and ingenious application of fables and morals, for he had read AEsop; he had a wonderful disposition to mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of Euclid that were read ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... fashion, some fact may be shown in another light by the manner of narration used by a particular witness. Take, as example, some energetically influential quality like humor. It is self-evident that joke, witticism, comedy, are excluded from the court-room, but if somebody has actually introduced real, genuine humor by way of the dry form of his testimony, without having crossed in a single word the permissible limit, he may, not rarely, narrate a ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of that well-appointed villa whence a reader can see the City near at hand—if among more serious poems there be any room for the wanton Muse of Comedy, you may place these seven little books I send you ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... which a woman's wit and self-sacrificing love save her husband from the toils of an adventuress, and change an apparently tragic situation into one of delicious comedy. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... all. Until she had quarrelled with her maid, Alice Deringham had apparently been incapable of putting on her own dresses unassisted, and it seemed that the grim, mysterious destiny which treated men as puppets and traversed all their schemes was the one factor to reckon with in that comedy. Deringham, however, found little solace in such reflections, and could not lie still, and rising, strained his ears to listen. There was nothing but the moaning of the wind, the ranch was very still, ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... posture, then swayed slightly. The hands of the girl and Dyck went out behind his back. As they touched his back, their fingers met, and Dyck's covered the girl's. Their eyes met, too, and the story told by Dyck in that moment was the beginning of a lifetime of experience, comedy, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... believe I have done what was genteel," and wonders how any mortal can live up three pair of stairs. "Is there," says the enthusiastic for the first time in her life, "so delightful a sight in the world as the four honors in one's own hand, unless it be the three natural aces at brag?" Can comedy be finer than this? Has not every person some Matthews and James in their acquaintance—one all passion, and the other all indifference and vapid self-complacency? James, the good-natured fellow, with passions and without principles: Bath, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... as a dress model, and sold soda checks in a drugstore. They don't load you down on payday in any of them places; but that didn't worry me. I was sizing up the good things, and I'd about decided on the front row of a musical comedy for mine, when what did I have to go and do but ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... entered St. John's College, Cambridge. Being obliged to leave his university course unfinished, he worked for a time with his step-father as a brick-layer. At the age of eighteen he enlisted as a volunteer in the Low Countries; but in 1596 he settled in London, as a playwright. His first comedy, "Every Man in his Humour," did not meet with immediate success. It was remodelled, at Shakespeare's suggestion, and when afterwards presented was received with marked favor. His first tragedy, "Sejanus," ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... literature. Among the fictions that may be compared with them we may mention "The Voyage of St. Brendan," "The Vision of Albericus," and "St. Patrick's Purgatory," imaginary descriptions, like Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy," of the supposed abode of the dead. The narrative of Marbodius is one of the latest works dealing with this theme, but it is ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... particularly noticed. It is as though the Italian nation at this epoch, suffocated by Spanish etiquette, and poisoned by Jesuitical hypocrisy, sought to expand healthy lungs in free spaces of open air, indulging in dialectical niceties and immortalizing street-jokes by the genius of masqued comedy. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... of Covent Garden Theatre fell into the hands of Laporte, he has favoured me with a commission to write a comedy for him, and the subject proposed by him is again the French novel of L'Heretiere, which turns out to be a literal translation of The Inheritance. He is quite bent upon having Miss Pratt on the stage. I have not chosen to give Monsieur Laporte any positive ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... was there and was unusually lively, told stories, and spoke of a journey that he intended to make to Italy in the course of the summer. Cahn's tragedy of "Griseldis" was to be performed for the first time that evening at the theatre. Tragedy was not his favorite subject, but comedy, and particularly the comedies of Holberg; but it was something new that he was to see, and it had become a sort of habit with him to pass the evening in the theatre. About six o'clock, therefore, he went to the theatre alone. The overture had begun; on ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... affirmative, and soon afterwards the stage was occupied by a new class of performers, and a drollery commenced which kept the audience in one continual roar of laughter so long as it lasted. And yet none of the parts had been studied, the actors entirely trusting to their own powers of comedy to carry it out. The principal character was the Cap Justice, enacted by Sir John Finett, who took occasion in the course of the performance to lampoon and satirise most of the eminent legal characters of the day, mimicking the voices and manner of the three justices—Crooke, Hoghton, and Doddridge—so ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... barley-meal and scald-milk for the pigs and carrying on bucolic flirtation with Billy Penticost. With the sheepishness of his sex, that youth made a great business of setting off to the well, his pails slung outwards on a hoop. The rustic comedy touched a long-atrophied fibre in Blanche. On an impulse of simplicity, she told herself, "Yes, this is the best thing. I won't go back to town; I'll live down here, close to the things that matter, and we'll ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... dead? Did she know that we couldn't have stood his being there but for our certainty that somewhere above us and yet with us, from his high seat among the Undying, Ford Lankester was looking on and enjoying more than we could enjoy—with a divine, immortal mirth—the rich, amazing comedy of him. Charles Wrackham there—at ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... omitting only his adventure in the factory. Many a guffaw from Mr. Lammie greeted its progress, and Miss Lammie laughed till the tears rolled unheeded down her cheeks, especially when Shargar, emboldened by the admiration Robert had awakened, imparted his private share in the comedy, namely, the entombment of Boston in a fifth-fold state; for the Lammies were none of the unco guid to be censorious upon such exploits. The whole business advanced the boys in favour at Bodyfauld; and the entreaties of Robert that nothing, should reach his ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald |
