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More "Banter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Rogers in his willingness to entertain professions of religious diversity. Yet he straitjacketed his liberalism when he denied responsible men the right to attack laws, both civil and canonical, with "ludicrous Insult" or "with Buffoonery and Banter, ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... Earth, for He is He: and if He slay me, I will laugh raillery at His Sword, and banter Him to His face: for His Sword is sharp Mercy, and His poisons kill my death. Fear not, therefore, little flock of Man! but take my comfort to your heart to-night, and my sweets to your tongue: for though ye have sinned, and hardened yourselves as brass, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... there was a little banter on the subject of painting. Could not the distinguished painter remain over one day and give his hosts a taste of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... is therefore as hopelessly false as the Elliot version. The Elliot version, with the Buccleuch incident, is "too absurd to be believed," and could not have been written (except in banter of Buccleuch), while men remembered the customs of the sixteenth century. The Scott version, again, could not be composed before the tradition arose that Gilbert Elliot WAS laird of Stobs before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... will forgive me. I do but speak in banter. It has been said that a good woman, fitly mated, grows doubly good; but how often have we seen a bad man mated to a good woman turned into a good man? Why, I myself was not wholly good till I married my wife; and, if the eminent soldier and gentleman in whose honor we are ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... manhood he took the world as he found it, and did not trouble himself about reforms or isms. He had only good-humored banter for the Abolitionists, just as he had for non-resistants and spirit-rappers. When progressive people were in a ferment with the new transcendental philosophy (deduced from the preaching of Channing and the essays of Emerson), and were fascinated by the monologues of Alcott and the sibylline ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... air. "You fellers'll bring up down on South Clark Street before you end. Some choice dive on the levee is gappin' for you. Now, mind you, I won't bail you out. You go into the game with your eyes open," he said, and his banter was highly pleasing to ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... them to the stand. Quickly availing themselves of the opportunity, the former, among the foremost of whom were Piper and Bart, now crowded eagerly round the cattle, and, after rapidly passing their hands over the cow and each of the oxen a moment, and then stepping back, began to banter and bid. Not much time, however, was allowed them to do either; for the cattle, all at once, became unaccountably restless, at first backing and wheeling about in their confined space, and then wildly tossing ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... in fair I 've braced me wi' pride, The bruse I hae won, and a kiss of the bride; And loud was the laughter, gay fellows among, When I utter'd my banter, or chorus'd my song. Dowie to dree are jesting and glee, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to cap something perfectly funny with something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation. Dryden does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. But sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders. Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of her own writing. ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... So long, old man," and he threaded his way past the rear of the brigade, not without some good-humoured banter at his dishevelled appearance. ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... There is music as the audience rustles and murmurs into its place with eager expectation. Then there is a prayer. Then Mr. Choate, the president of the day, with his customary felicity and sparkling banter, speaks of the origin of the ancient and mysterious brotherhood. "And now," he says, in ending, "I introduce to you him who, whenever and wherever he speaks, is the orator of the day." Mr. Phillips rises, and buttons his frock-coat across his white waistcoat ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... "Shakspeare and the musical glasses" always. Our discourse was generally composed of much lighter elements, especially when Mr Mawley and I did not come in contact—argument being then, naturally, as a dead letter. Our conversation during these peaceful interregnums mainly consisted in friendly banter, parish news, and gossip. Scandal Miss Pimpernell never permitted; indeed, no one would have had the heart to say an ill-natured thing of ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... food and wine in his veins were doing their work, and a pleasant warmth was stealing over Hardrow. He found to his surprise that airy banter ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... not very often, he seems to have let spleen take the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all mistresses are that. You have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... not accustomed to have that remark taken seriously, still it usually provoked a laugh or a paragraph of sentimental banter. And he hated to be called fresh, except in a joking way. His charitable impulse died ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... that sort of thing. But to a certain extent he had laid himself open to banter by the lasting character of his impressions which were connected with the passion of love and, perhaps, were not of such a rare kind as he seemed to think them. What made his comrades tolerant of his rhapsodies was the fact that they were connected ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... of Brand, Braund, and Barnes, is a Banter on Criticks, and Genealogists, who make such a Pother about the Orthography of Names and Things, that many Times, three Parts in four of a Folio Treatise, is taken up in ascertaining the Propriety of a Syllable, by which Means the ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... shouldering her box, leaving Macomber trying to return the banter of the riders. The good-natured raillery was interrupted by a sharp word ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... if we are prepossessed—as even Mr. Fleay still seems to be—by the old commentators' notion of a deep ill-will on Jonson's part towards Shakspere. There was probably no such ill-will in the matter, the burly scholar's habit of robust banter being enough to account for the form of his remark. As a matter of fact, his own plays are strewn with classic transcriptions; and though he evidently plumed himself on his power of "invention"[108] in the matter of plots—a faculty which he knew Shakspere ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... good-natured banter. There was not a sign of panic in the army. The men at once formed themselves into line of battle, according to their instructions, and opened a terrible fire upon the weeds in which the warriors lay concealed. ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... It is international; the contrast of American and foreign ways runs through it, and Mr. Howells has added the contrast of the old and the new Americanism. The hero is a Western journalist, a Mugwump, much given to banter of the American ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... politics; They lost their weeks; they vext the souls of deans; They rode; they betted; made a hundred friends, And caught the blossom of the flying terms, But missed the mignonette of Vivian-place, The little hearth-flower Lilia. Thus he spoke, Part banter, part affection. 'True,' she said, 'We doubt not that. O yes, you missed us much. I'll stake my ruby ring ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... it is a crucifix, and Eugene is going to entrap us into a confession," returned De la Roche, who loved to banter his cousin. ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... been waiting for a chance of escape, suddenly wore a look of interest. He rapidly surveyed the trio. Christian, somewhat out of countenance, tried to answer Malkin in a tone of light banter. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... this comedy the following play was given: first appeared a boy in woman's clothes who represented Virtue, and another in the character of Fortune. They began to banter each other as to which was the mightier, whereupon Fame suddenly appeared, standing on a globe which rested on a float, upon which were the words, "Gloria Domus Borgiae." Fame, who also called himself Light, awarded Virtue the prize over Fortune, saying ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... courtesy. Moreover, as Paula had herself observed, they did not marry at the end of the piece, as in Shakespeare's other comedies. Somewhat calm in this assurance, he waited on while the other couples respectively indulged in their love-making, and banter, including Mrs. Camperton as the sprightly Rosaline. But he was doomed to be surprised out of his humour when the end of the act came on. In abridging the play for the convenience of representation, the favours or gifts from ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Henry gaily; "then we could get wood in abundance, and perhaps," he added, looking slyly over to the stove where some bread-soup was in preparation for their very temperate repast, "some better fare for dinner. But," he continued in a tone of humorous banter, which he frequently adopted, and pushing back his chair a few paces as he spoke, "while you superintend the household concerns, and give the necessary orders to the cook, I will withdraw into my study. Now, what would I not write if only pen, paper, and ink, were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... shifting the subject to athletics, and was in the highest spirits the rest of the day; but underneath all his fun and banter the question constantly arose in his inner consciousness: How could he elude his roommate's watchfulness and on the coming Saturday escape ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... Pompeians in a certain rencontre had lost a great many men, he took a fancy to visit their camp. There he perceived little strength, less courage, but much disorder. From that time, foreseeing that things would go ill with them, as it since happened, he began to banter now one and then another, and be very free of his cutting jests; so some of Pompey's captains, playing the good fellows to show their assurance, told him, Do you see how many eagles we have yet? (They were then the device of the Romans ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... cried the simple old father, as the girl tripped away in hot haste to seek for it; "I forbid you to make such a guy of yourself. You must not take my little banter, darling, in such a matter-of-fact way, or I must hold ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... very pale, and experiencing a certain sudden sinking of the heart—for this was a serious and most unlooked-for event, and for a while put out of his head all the agitating thoughts of the last few hours. Poor Titmouse had enough to bear—what with the delicate raillery and banter of his refined companions for the rest of the day, find the galling tyranny of Mr. Tag-rag, (who dogged him about all day, setting him about the most menial and troublesome offices he could, and constantly saying mortifying things to him before customers,) ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... wink from the wary old Jew, began to ply her with liquor: of which, however, she took very sparingly; while Fagin, assuming an unusual flow of spirits, gradually brought Mr. Sikes into a better temper, by affecting to regard his threats as a little pleasant banter; and, moreover, by laughing very heartily at one or two rough jokes, which, after repeated applications to the ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... from her. In the afternoon he saw her, with Alf and Johnnie, starting for the chestnut-trees, and although she passed not far away she gave him only a slight greeting, and did not stop for a little merry banter, as usual. The young fellow was becoming very unhappy, and he felt that his position was growing intolerable. That Amy should be cold toward him, or, indeed, toward any one, was an unheard-of thing, and he knew that she must feel ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... my sister who told me that Mary was engaged to be married. But I had noticed for some days how the neighbors went out of their way to accost her upon our walks; to banter her kindly, to shake hands with her, to wag their heads and look chin-chucks even if they gave none. Her face wore a beautiful mantling red for hours at a time. And instead of being made more sedate by her responsible and settling prospects she shed the half of her years, ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... "Very well, see you to-morrow. Meanwhile, be good. Flee the giddy lure. Go home to your little bed and sleep sweet." There was seriousness under his good-natured banter. "Come along and I'll see you as ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... had already been taken up, as the phrase goes, by the elite of Edinburgh; and it shows also and quite as clearly in the tone of quiet banter, that he was little likely to lose his head by the notice taken of him. To the Earl of Glencairn, mentioned in it, he had been introduced probably by Mr. Dalrymple of Orangefield, whom he knew both as a brother-mason and a brother-poet. The Earl had already seen the Kilmarnock Edition ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as if to banter me, and I concluded to accept the challenge. I galloped towards him for fifty yards and he advanced towards me about the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and then, when we were only about thirty yards ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... fact remained that Hermia had not accepted him. His insistence had always provoked and still provoked one of two moods—either resentment or mockery. She either dismissed him in a dudgeon or cajoled him with elusive banter. Why was he so impatient? There was plenty of time? Was he sure that he wanted to marry her? What did her really know about her heart of hearts? Perhaps, if he knew her better he might not want to ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... the mingling of banter, and earnestness, of archness, devotion, shyness and fervor implied in the Latin words as uttered ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced his intention of marrying her, dans les delais legaux, the squire protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember that in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and banter. 'Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your mistress heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the man who marries. And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a false position.' But he soon became serious, presently furious, and, when ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... then with some needlework went out on the veranda. At the table she listened and responded interestedly to Mrs. Merlin's bromidic remarks, was gentle with the children and most flatteringly deferential to Kurt. Of her former banter and coquetry toward him there was no trace. After the children had gone to bed, she played cribbage with Mrs. Merlin ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... This banter, coupled with the assurance that the girl knew exactly what she was about, cooled Lennon's excitement. His high ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... excepted—many people, perhaps most people, are as infants. They have little sense of humor. They don't like jokes. Raillery in writing annoys and offends them. The coarseness apart, I think I have met very, very few women who liked the banter of Swift and Fielding. Their simple, tender natures revolt at laughter. Is the satyr always a wicked brute at heart, and are they rightly shocked at his grin, his leer, his horns, hoofs, and ears? Fi donc, le vilain monstre, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with a short laugh, relapsing into that light tone of banter which was his most natural mode of expression; "when, one fine day, a hired coach clattered up Sir Rupert Landale's avenue and deposited upon his porch a tattered mariner who announced himself, in melancholy ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... men, the mothers and older women rather stiff, and usually hampered by at least one child, which they carry on their backs or on their hips, while another holds on to the garment which replaces our skirts. There is plenty of laughter and banter with the men, who look on unmoved at the efforts of the weaker sex, only rarely ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... trivial one, but it diverted attention for a time from the fact of Paul's absence, and when the religious went back to the house and found Brother Andrew returned to his old duty as doorkeeper, the laughter was renewed, and there was some playful banter. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... who dealt at the store and frequented the hotel did so for her sake, and she was willing to extend her father's trade. In fact, she helped to manage both businesses as cleverly as she managed the customers. Her charm was largely physical, but she used it with caution. One might indulge in banter, and Sadie had a ringing laugh that young men liked, but there were limits that few who knew her overstepped. One or two had done so, but had been rebuked in a way they wished to forget. Sadie had ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... indescribable something which may be called "pedigree." So, on Monday her turn would come. And, moreover, the Marquise knew that as soon as people learned that the stranger was her cousin, they would suspend their banter and look ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... new party by a series of novels, the romances cannot be works of literary art. If a young man wants only to advertise his own smartness, he will not produce a beautiful thing. And if a statesman out of office wishes to amuse himself by alternate banter and laudation of the very society which he has led and which looks to him as its inspiration, the result will be infinitely entertaining, but not a great work of art. Disraeli therefore with literary gifts of a very high order never used them in the ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... not going to banter with you, Passford. Where are your orders?" demanded the first lieutenant ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... three engagements to dance. Jim Yeager had waylaid her; so, too, had Slim and Curly. She waltzed first with Phil, and after he had done his duty he left her to the besiegings of half a score of riders for various ranches who came and went and came again. She joked with them, joined the merry banter that went on, laughed at them when they grew sentimental, always with a sprightly devotion to the matter ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... passed with the banter that invariably took place when Rube was of the party. It was late when they left the Squire's, the constable going along with them, and all singing merrily as ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... you mid meet in your journey might notice the set of it, I suppose. Fancy, men in love don't think so much about how they look to other women." It is difficult to say whether a tone of playful banter or of gentle reproach prevailed in ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... perhaps it might not be all, lay heavy on their hearts all the way home, and made their drive a silent one. It never came into Jem's mind to banter Davie about the new dignity of his office as reader, as at first he had intended to do, or, indeed, to say anything at all, till they were nearly home. As for David, he was going over and over the very same things that had filled his ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... General was in the saddle very early, and left camp before the staff was ready. I was fortunate enough to be on hand, and indulged in some excusable banter when the tardy members of our company rode up after we were a mile or two on the way. We have marched twelve miles to-day through a lovely country. We have left the hills and stony roads behind us, and now we pass over beautiful little prairies, bordered by forests blazing with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... new variety in her eyes, and entertained her greatly. Where the bounds of banter ended, was not easy to define, but whenever he tried a little mystification, she either entered merrily into the humour, or threw it over with keen wit that he kept constantly on the stretch. They were always discovering odd, unexpected bits of knowledge ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... unusually strong, and it is from the unreserved correspondence between Finley and Sidney that some of the most interesting material for this work has been gathered. Both of these brothers possessed a keen sense of humor and delighted in playful banter. The following is written in pencil on an odd scrap of paper ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... have been 'up to,' I certainly never have been 'up to' marrying two wives at one time," answered Alden, in the same spirit of half banter, half protest. ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... night, so that going on was out of the question, from the swollen state of the river; so I walked off before breakfast, with Angelo, to an Arab village, about a mile and a half distant, to inquire about boars. The promise of some powder brought out the inhabitants; and, after a little banter and chaffing, they agreed to meet me after breakfast, and to show me one of those animals. So I returned to the caravanserai to breakfast, and then, with my friend, rode back to the Arab huts. ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... irony Washington was greatly amused. The wit of the remark is a little cold to-day, but at the moment, accompanying as it did a solemn act of abjuration, it was keen enough. Washington himself, moreover, was perfectly capable of good-natured banter. Colonel Humphreys challenged him one day to jump over a hedge. Washington, always ready to accept a challenge where riding was concerned, told the colonel to go on. Humphreys put his horse at the hedge, cleared it, and landed in ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... less depressed in their own proper environment, on excursions suddenly see themselves in their true light, irresistibly facetious. These funny gentlemen, mostly husbands, seated themselves near to large groups of indulgent women and kept up an exquisite banter directed at each other's personal defects, or upon the idiosyncrasies of any bachelor or spinster near. These funny gentlemen kept alluding to the excursion as the "Exertion." If the boat rolled a little they said, "Now, Mother, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Benson," said Superintendent Galloway, nodding his head at the innkeeper with a kind of ferocious banter. "You're really a first-class villain, upon my soul! But this precious story with which you've tried to bamboozle us is not complete. Would it be putting too much strain on your inventive faculties to ask you, while ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... talking of the scholars who had sat here and there, Miss Ludington began gently to banter Ida about this and that boyish sweetheart, and divers ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... a sudden spirit of banter Terry turned to the Major: "Before I begin, Major, I wish to congratulate you upon having won to the bliss of matrimony without violating that bachelor formula which you ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... consequence at all. Her principal delusion was that she did all the work in the up-stairs rooms of the house, while Martha did it down-stairs. The truth was seen only by the husband, who treated Martha with a kindness that was half banter, half deference. Martha herself had no suspicion that she was the only pillar of the domestic edifice. The situation was without definitions. Martha made definitions, but she devoted them entirely to the Armenians ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... clambered breathlessly into a coal car, and snuggled down into a corner inside a little strip of shade, and panted like a hunted rabbit. A sickening pain throbbed up from his toe. The train moved slowly at first, and Jimmy knew that he could not hide from the train men in a coal car. On a banter from Piggy Pennington and Bud Perkins Jimmy had ridden on the brake-beam while the switch engine was pulling freight cars about the railroad yards. He had a vague idea that midway of the train, between ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... three separate pamphlets, each bearing the title, "Cracks about the Kirk, for Country Folks." Two of these pamphlets, written in "broad Scotch," were remarkable for their pungency and effective banter. Although published anonymously, it was generally known that these pamphlets owed their existence to "young Norman," and they contributed very materially to establish his growing fame as a writer and preacher. During the memorable year of the Disruption he was a member of the General Assembly, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... she had been cheated. Why had he not told her? Why did he let her play and romp and joke and banter with him as though they had been children and equals? It wasn't fair! He was just laughing, at her! Just laughing at her! All her spirit was ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... At St. Ethelberta's, however, she had begun in her quiet way to make a place for herself. She was already quite a favourite among her house-mates. They teased her a little, but in quite a good-tempered fashion, and Dona, accustomed to the continual banter of a large family, took all chaffing with the utmost calm. She was happier at school than she had expected to be. Miss Jones, the hostel mistress, was genial and warm-hearted, and kept well in touch with her girls. She talked to them about their various hobbies, and was herself interested ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... this Edition, and to cry down its Editor, I have all the Grounds in nature to beware of Attacks. But tho' the Malice of Wit, join'd to the Smoothness of Versification, may furnish some Ridicule; Fact, I hope, will be able to stand its Ground against Banter ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... on, but hearing nothing of General Williams, and knowing the strength of the position, did not attack. He had a brass band with him, which he made play "Dixie," in the hope that it would lure the enemy out; but this strategical banter was treated with profound indifference. General Williams had marched on the north side of the Holston river to Rogersville, and thence to Greenville, where we met him upon our return next day. His command was about two thousand ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Mrs. Marteen, to effect this little business deal without compromising either of us?" His tone was half banter, but her ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... world would she, at this stage of the affair, have revealed her anxiety to her brother, who held the even tenor of his way, whatever he felt—never obtrusive and never negligent. He treated Bessie like the girl of sense she was, with courtesy, but without compliments or any idle banter; and Bessie certainly began to enjoy his society. He improved on acquaintance, and made the hours pass much more pleasantly at Brentwood when he was there than they passed in his absence. This was promising. The evening's dinner-party ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... difficult to detect how much of conviction and how much of banter there was in his treatment of men engaged in the actual intellectual movement of our times. I found such to be the case in my own intercourse with him. He always attacked me in a bantering way, but, I thought, half in earnest too. Hence I never found ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Italian banter, appears to have taken the position of the ass with us in England, as a dull, heavy beast, a fool. Michael Angelo's answer was, as it were: "It is according to the asses you mean; if it be these asses of Bolognese doubtless they are much bigger; if ours of Florence they are ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... statue-like, In act to render thanks. I, that whole day, Saw her no more, altho' I linger'd there Till every daisy slept, and Love's white star Beam'd thro' the thicken'd cedar in the dusk. So home we went, and all the livelong way With solemn gibe did Eustace banter me. "Now," said he, "will you climb the top of Art; You cannot fail but work in hues to dim The Titianic Flora. Will you match My Juliet? you, not you,—the Master, Love, A more ideal ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... obliged to own that his cutlets could not be relished, even by hungry men. They began to banter him about his "Olympian dish," and indulge in jokes at his expense; but all he cared about was to find out how it happened that the flesh of the guanaco, which was certainly good and eatable food, had turned out so badly in his hands. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... came, and the boys were all out for "recreation," Jan had to endure some chaff on the subject of his accomplishments. But the banter of London street boys was familiar to him, and he took it in good part. When they found him good-tempered, he was soon popular, and they asked his history with ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... should drive away Little sweet maidens from the play, Or love to banter and fight so well, That 's the thing ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... they stared at my Comments, and sometimes might slumber, Yet the Truth they might fancy beneath all my Lumber: But your stupid Jargon is seen through instanter, And your Works give the Wits new Subjects for Banter. Such cler-obscure Aid may I meet again never! For now Milles and I will be laugh'd at ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... punctilio. The planter himself seemed to be the dynamo that generated the larger portion of the gaiety and wit. The younger ones at the board found it more than difficult to turn back on him his guns of raillery and banter. It is true, the young men attempted to storm his works repeatedly, incited by the hope of gaining the approbation of their fair companions; but even when they sped a well-aimed shaft, the planter forced them to feel defeat by the tremendous ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... do seem to 'ave 'ad the honour of my acquaintance some'ow," returned the boy, whose tone of banter quickly passed away. "What ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... a suggestion of laughter in the husky voice, now, of a sort of contemptuous banter. But Cairn stolidly shook his head and ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... to be Sadie Dean), vied with each other in amusing the more diffident guests. Sadie Dean, much to the others' surprise—and perhaps to her own—disclosed an intimate knowledge of the most fascinating games; and these games, with Jamie's stories and Jerry's good-natured banter, kept every one in gales of laughter until supper and the generous distribution of presents from the laden tree sent the happy guests home with ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... instance, came up to me and hugged me with great warmth. By general consent I was now granted the right of behaving with almost studied rudeness, and I replied even to Jenny's warm outburst only with my usual banter. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... The biggest ketch you ever seen in your life. It's ketch the Flying U outfit and squeeze the life out of it; that's the ketch." Andy's tone had in it no banter, but considerable earnestness. For, though Chip would no doubt convince the boys that the danger was very real, there was a small matter of personal pride to urge Andy into trying to convince, them himself, without aid from Chip or any ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... their banter the old windmill, perhaps because it was the only thing stirring, held them and sobered their thoughts as it would not have done elsewhere. Perhaps they felt a sort of consciousness of its lonely position and ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... went to Troy. She remained in Egypt, and Achaeans and Trojans fought for a mere shadow, formed by the Gods out of clouds and wind. In the "Cyclops" of Euripides, a satirical drama, the cynical giant is allowed to speak of Helen in a strain of coarse banter. Perhaps the essay of Isocrates on Helen may be regarded as a kind of answer to the attacks of several speakers in the works of the tragedians. Isocrates defends Helen simply on the plea of her beauty: "To Heracles Zeus gave strength, to Helen beauty, ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... took part jointly in many affairs, but Bob got Marjorie to himself as much as possible. The others chaffed them a good deal, but as the banter was all good-natured, it ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... of the tent-house and listen unseen. Inside there was always cheer: at night the crackle of fire and the glow of light, the happy laughter of the gentle-hearted Scotchwoman, and the affectionate banter of her "big mountain man," who looked more like a brigand than the luckiest and most contented husband in the mountains—the luckiest, quite surely, with the one exception of his brother Clossen, who had, by ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... hand-bags, blankets and a two-gallon demijohn. They said they had driven from Winona that day, and would stay all night. They ordered supper, and while it was in course of preparation, indulged in a good deal of banter back and forth. Of course, I had formed the determination of becoming acquainted with the contents of that demijohn in some way, by fair means or foul, and became deeply interested in their conversation, looking for a favorable chance to carry my point. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and exquisite suggestion, are disappointed in Burke; they even find him stiff and over-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said of it, and very often unseasonable. We feel that Johnson must have been right in declaring that though Burke was always in search of pleasantries, ...
— Burke • John Morley
... the Queen, in a low voice, tender, but with a sort of banter, "she thought she had the plague spot on her little white shoulders. Didst thou really not know what marks ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... parodies, which combine the mocking spirit with clever imitations of the style and affectations of familiar poets. They are witty; they are humorous; they are good-natured; and they are artistic and extraordinarily clever. His satirical banter shown in these verses—most of which are real poems as well as parodies—has been classed as "refined common-sense," and "the exuberant playfulness of a powerful mind and tender and manly nature." It contains also independent literary ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... medicated draughts are often mentioned in Romances. The reader will recollect the banter upon them in Don Quixote, where the Knight of La enumerates to Sancho the cures which had been performed upon many valorous champions, covered with wounds. The Hindus, in their books on medicine, talk of drugs for the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... a rooster-fight," retorted Reeves. In his triumph he was not unwilling to banter repartee with the hateful Hiram. "You fellers with what you call sportin' blood"—he sneered the words—"come along and think nobody else can't do anything right but you. You fetch along cat-meat with feathers on it"—he pointed at the vanquished ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... to wheel his barrow, which was full of gravel, over Davy's toes. The said toes were sticking quite bare through great holes in an old pair of woman's boots. Then he began to tease him rather roughly. But Davy took all his banter with just the same complacency and mirth with which he had received the kindliness of the ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... vehemently for many hours together. His prominent, heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways amorously and languidly, the bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and his dark smooth moustache covered his thick lips capable of much honeyed banter. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... the name for the last sheaf is Boba (Old Woman), answering to the Polish name Baba. The Boba is said to sit in the corn which is left standing last. The person who binds the last sheaf or digs the last potato is the subject of much banter, and receives and long retains the name of the Old Rye-woman or the Old Potato-woman. The last sheaf—the Boba—is made into the form of a woman, carried solemnly through the village on the last harvest-waggon, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Under all this banter Serviss perceived the pulse of an interest which laid hold on the most secret hopes and fears of the youngest and shook the eldest with an elemental dread and longing. It was as if the flood-gates of ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... are laid on the thatch of the huts for the hens to lay in, and on the arrival of strangers, men, women, and children ply their calling as hucksters with a great deal of noisy haggling; all their transactions are conducted with civil banter and good temper. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... merely in a spirit of banter, but as she stubbornly persisted in her refusals, he began to think that she really had had some ridiculous adventure, and was determined to find out what it was. So he set traps for her, and cross-questioned ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... This sort of banter did not appeal to the Indian girl. She did not, in fact, hear much of it. All her attention was given to the play on the stage and the brilliant audience. She had traveled considerably with Dakota Joe's show, but she had never seen anything like the ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... the dining-room was empty when he finished. Usually he had some cheerful banter for Tillie, to which she responded in kind. But, what with the heat and with heaviness of spirit, he did not notice ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... somebody asked me what I'd have I took a glass of water. Several of my friends looked inquiringly at me and one asked: "On the wagon?" This attracted the attention of the entire group to my glass of water. I came in for a good deal of banter, mostly along the line that it was time I went on the wagon. This was varied with predictions that I would stay on from an hour to a day or so. I didn't like that talk, but I bluffed it out—weakly, to be sure. I said ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... self-assertive, as the hard, brilliant Irish intellect so often is. He liked people to talk to him. He liked to know the colours of people's minds. He liked to be amused. His merriest talk was like playing catch with an apple of banter, which ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... requisite. The style and formality of the speech amused Mr Hobhouse, as well as others; and, when the minister retired, he began to rally his Lordship on the subject. But Byron really fancied that he had acquitted himself with grace and dignity, and took the jocularity of his friend amiss—a little banter ensued—the poet became petulant, and Mr Hobhouse walked on; while Byron, on account of his lameness, and the roughness of the pavement, took hold of my arm, appealing to me, if he could have said ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... you like. Perhaps it's because it's not pleasant to see white men landing at a quiet island like this with revolvers slung to their waists under their pyjamas; looks a bit too much like Bully Hayes' style for me," and then his tone of cool banter suddenly changed to that of studied insolence. "I say, Motley, I was talking about you just now to Taplin AND Nerida. Do you want to know what I was saying? Perhaps I had better tell you. I was talking about ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... trousers pocket. He regarded Little Billy with sympathy. For the past few days, the hunchback had again been engaged in a bout with his ancient enemy. Little Billy was fighting manfully, but the strain was telling, aging his mobile face, making rare his sunny smile and whimsical banter. Martin keenly felt the other's suffering, for he had learned to love the ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... been easy to tell my mother that I had given up the California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such an accusation with the banter and levity which it ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... birthplace, was famous for the license of its country folk. Since the day of its foundation by Chalkidian colonists, its inhabitants had preserved their Hellenic traditions intact. The vintage, for example, was celebrated with an extravagance of obscene banter, which scandalized Philip II.'s viceroy in the sixteenth century.[85] During the period of Bruno's novitiate, the ordinances of the Council of Trent for discipline in monasteries were not yet in operation; and it is probable that throughout the thirteen years of his conventual ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... In this spirit of banter the playwright and the star were left alone with the manuscript of the play. As he read on, Douglass was carried out of his own impassivity by the changes in the face before him. It became once more elusive, duskily mysterious in its lines. A reflective shadow darkened the glorious ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... little or no influence with his followers during the fight, though on account of his personal prowess he is looked up to as a pillar of strength and would, no doubt, if given the opportunity, or if the abuse and banter were extreme, engage in a hand-to-hand encounter. Numerous cases of this ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... other hand, working his hand slowly round his wrist, and I noticed that Juggroo immediately changed the subject. This, as I afterwards learned, is the invariable Nepaulese custom of showing anger. They grasp the wrist as I have said, and it is taken as a sign that, if you do not discontinue your banter, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... superiority that was resented by her Southern sisters as well as by her Northern partners. The Old North State derided the pretensions of the commonwealths that flanked her on either side, and Georgia was not slow to give South Carolina as good as she sent. All this seemed to be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old enough and strong enough to encourage the hopes of the Union leaders that the Confederacy would split along state lines. The cohesive power of the Revolutionary war was not sufficiently ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... "your majesty will no longer be surprised, when you understand, that this is not as you suppose a bird, but a man." "Madam," said the king, more astonished than before, "you mean to banter me; but you shall never persuade me that a bird can be a man." "Sir," replied the queen, "far be it from me to banter your majesty; nothing is more certain than what I have had the honour to tell you. I can assure your majesty, it is the king of Persia, named Beder, son of ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... recognized by even those who differed with him on questions of doctrine as "the most learned, polished and modest spirit that ever separated from the Church of England." To the prepotency of this distinguished divine, General Smith often, in a tone of mingled banter and seriousness, attributed not only his habit of mature reflection and love of learning, but also his "moderation combined with firmness" upon all questions which engaged ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... with him on this neglect of his studies; but Hoffland always turned aside his advice with some amusing speech, or humorous banter. When the elder student said, "Now, Charles, as your friend I counsel you not to throw away your time and dissipate your mind;" to this Hoffland would reply, "Yes, you are right, Ernest; the morning, as you say, is lovely." Or when Mowbray would say, "Charles, ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... schoolboy manner, and he was adopting a gentle, pathetic tone, at which Albinia was apt to laugh, but in her absence was often verged upon tendresse, especially with Genevieve. She, however, by her perfect simplicity and lively banter, always nipped the bud of his sentiment, she had known him from a child, and never lost the sense of being his elder, treating him somewhat as a boy to be played with. Perfectly aware of her own position, her demeanour, frank and gracious as it was, had something in it which kept ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... themselves in the river while they lament the loss of their beautiful treasure. Siegfried, who has strayed from his companions in the chase, now appears, and they beg him for the ring upon his finger, at first with playful banter, and afterwards in sober earnest, warning him that if he does not give it back to them he will perish that very day. He laughs at their womanly wiles, and they vanish as his comrades appear. After the midday halt, Siegfried tells Gunther ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... began again upon a vein of foolish banter, for the amusement of the Sheriff and his guests, all ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... continued his banter she served him and attempted to serve Kate behind the curtains. By persistent, almost despairing pantomime, Kate dissuaded her from this. But at that moment the front door opened again, a brisk greeting was called ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... and began to banter her. The gentleman who was sent to try the slipper looked earnestly at Cinderella, and, finding her very handsome, said it was but just that she should try, and that he had orders to let every lady try ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... be such as thine To stir my brain a bit. When 'round this hearth of mine Friends sit and banter wit, She'll shape a well-turned phrase, a ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... indeed! Ber. Yet I'm very innocent. Aman. That I dare swear you are. I know how to make allowances for your humour: but you resolve then never to marry again? Ber. Oh no! I resolve I will. Aman. How so? Ber. That I never may. Aman. You banter me. Ber. Indeed I don't: but I consider I'm a woman, and form my resolutions accordingly. Aman. Well, my opinion is, form what resolutions you will, matrimony will be the end on't. Ber. I doubt it—but a—Heavens! I have business at home, and am half an hour too late. Aman. As you ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... cold for butterflies up here," she laughed. "Wait until I get down to the warm hall." But although she returned his banter, she did not look at him, her eyes were downcast, and on the drive down the hill she scarcely spoke. Seagreave was one of those rare persons who respect another's mood of silence, and consequently he did not notice this new constraint which had ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... won't forget in a hurry. So they have been well punished, and Tommy has been wired to to come home at once, so he has been punished. And Hilary's punishment here is to come. It will take the form of such endless banter and chaff from her brothers and sisters that it will be a long time before she thinks of playing private detective to any one in ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... for the night with the decencies of family affection, and Bessie delivered the elder lady over to her maid. Then the girl sank down again, and lay musing in her deep chair before the fire with her book shut on her thumb. She looked rather old and worn in her reverie; her face lost the air of gay banter which, after the beauty of her queer eyes and her vivid mouth, was its charm. The eyes were rather dull now, and the mouth was a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... him while he quite recovers. When Jasper is restored, he lays a tender hand upon his nephew's shoulder, and, in a tone of voice less troubled than the purport of his words—indeed with something of raillery or banter ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... most "civilized" undertook to banter me on my non-appearance in the classic regions of Barnwell.—Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. Univ., Ed. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... so close that her stool touched the chair. She bent her cheek upon the shrivelled hand resting upon the arm. The excitement and feverish banter of Truedale affected her painfully. She reproached herself bitterly for having left him to the mercy of his loneliness and imagination. Her interest in, her resentment for, Conning faded before the pitiful display of feeling expressed in every ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... have realized it was not her own property, but unfortunately didn't. She calmly appropriated the bunch, and distributed it in portions to those nearest her. Peachy's cheeks flamed. She was a hot-tempered little soul underneath her gay banter. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... "Don't banter me," she said, wounded at what appeared to be his flippancy. He did not mind the entreaty, but the tone with its delicate note of pathos was like a reproach. He could not explain; he could not tell her that he had penetrated her mood and understood. He said nothing except to offer her his ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... ride rough-shod; he was never pleased when his path crossed people over whom he could not ride rough-shod. Generally she had accepted his classification of those who opposed him strongly as "blamed idiots"; sometimes with a little of her laughing banter, but usually, his superiority standing out sharp and clear when opposed to the dull Canaanites, endorsing his opinion. "I sort of wish," he went on, with that keen, wire-edged exasperation still sawing in his voice, "that you wouldn't have much to do with that chap. He isn't my ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... short, so patiently and good-humouredly that all boys who had in them a spark of sense or honour very soon abandoned this system of torment, and made up for it as far as they could by respect and kindness, which always, however, took more or less the form of banter. It is not to be expected that boys will ever be made to see that steady, strenuous industry, even when it fails, is a greater and a better thing than idle cleverness, but those few who were so far in advance of their years as to have some intuition of this fact, felt for ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... "the case is too serious for banter of this kind. My dear boy," he added, kindly, "I am glad to see you angry, but nevertheless, you must condescend to explain. The longer you allow suspicion to rest on yourself the longer it will be before it falls on the right person. Come, what were you doing in the ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... new shoes, leaped down to help Missy in. She had received her mother's last admonition, her father's last banter, Aunt Nettie's last anxious peck at her sash, and was just lifting her foot to the surrey step when ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... once to banter me on my indifference to art, seeing that I had sniffed at a miniature by one of the most famous artists at the French Court. I let him rattle on, for my eye was on Sir James, who was rolling something in his hands. A moment later the Prince's letter went up in a tongue of flame and burnt ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... say, you think I have sense enough to love you," said Fanny, still in a tone of banter. "We part as friends, however, and if you insist on coming to call upon my sister, Mrs Barton, of course I cannot help it, only do not for a moment suppose that ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... people lounged about, and heard with keen satisfaction and relief the click of a telegraph instrument that seemed at once to bring him into contact with the remote world. He filed his telegrams and walked the length of the broad hall, his riding-crop under his arm. The gay banter and laughter of a group of young men and women just returned from a drive gave him a touch of heartache, for there was a girl somewhere in the valley whom he had followed across the sea, and these people were of her own world—they undoubtedly knew her; very likely she came often to this huge ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... and brilliant speech he poked rare fun at the dinner-debating members who were so ready to participate in the festivities of the society and so lax in attending the discussions. He not only did this with delicious banter and pointed sarcasm; but, with an audacious touch all his own, he coupled the toast with the name of one member present. This brought the ruffled gentleman up on to his legs, and, smarting under Mr. Chamberlain's ironical philippics, ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... enjoyment of a pleasant contempt for all that immediately surrounds him. Pedantic /literati/, vain youngsters, every sort of narrowness and conceit, he banters rather than satirizes; and even his banter expresses no contempt. Just in the same way does he jest about his own condition, his misfortune, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... up the street—'twas a saunter A score of years back, when I strolled From this door; and our talk was all banter Those days when her hair was of gold, And the sea-fog less ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... Hey day, rascal, do you banter me? Sirrah, d'ye banter me? Speak, sirrah, where is he? for ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... their sashes were pistols, and those keen carved knives called jambiyahs. At first our natives, believing that they were friendlies, went forward enthusiastically, determined to drive them back with banter, there not being room to pass, but very soon Omar ordered another halt, and turning towards us, cried in a loud voice in ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... There was no concealing the awkwardness of his position. The sneers of the waiter revealed it. His acquaintances amused themselves for some tune at his expense, professing their inability to relieve him. When, however, they had enjoyed their banter, the waiter was paid, and poor Goldsmith enabled to convoy off ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... sung by the Syracusan to Lady Selene, and the popular poetry alike of Italy and Greece is full of those delicate touches of refined sentiment that in Theocritus appear so incongruous with the rough coats and rougher banter of the shepherds. For though the poet raised the pastoral life of Sicily into the realms of ideal poetry, he was careful not to dissociate his version from reality, and he allowed no imaginary conceptions to overmaster his art. He depicted ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... way before the important purpose I had formed, and to which the banter now recalled me. So fair an opportunity might never offer again. In the vicissitudes of a soldier's life, the chance of to-day should not be disregarded—to-morrow may bring change either in the scene or the circumstances; and I was skilled enough in love-lore to know that an hour unimproved ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... I used, when we were boys, to go into the Church of the Carmine to learn drawing from the chapel of Masaccio. It was Buonarroti's habit to banter all who were drawing there; and one day, when he was annoying me, I got more angry than usual, and, clenching my fist, I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... half-frightened, though a fierce exultation surged within her. She had half expected this, half dreaded it, and now that it had burst upon her in such volcanic fashion she realized that she had not been entirely prepared. She sought refuge in banter, facing him, her ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... in a circle. But this looks more like 'Blind Man's Buff' than 'Ring-Around-A-Rosy,' don't you think? Or are you trying to play 'Tag' with me? Well, you're 'It' anyway," he said, dropping all hint of banter in his tone. "I'd advise you to meet a few straight questions with straight answers. First, who is this Joe person you were expecting to do the canoeing ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... had ceased to joke and banter. The situation was serious. Some tried to smoke, but their parching thirst was thus only aggravated—they ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... at once." Fred dropped his banter. "I'll tell you what, Nancy. I may not be able to do much right off, but I'll promise you that he has a fair chance before the ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... forpeli. Bank (money) banko. Bank (river) bordo. Bank (sand) sablajxo. Bank (note) banka bileto. Banker bankiero. Bankrupt bankroto. Bankrupt, to become bankroti. Banner flago, standardo. Banns edzigxanonco. Banquet festeno. Banter moki. Baptism bapto. Baptize bapti. Bar bari. Barbarian barbaro. Barbarism barbarismo. Barber barbiro. Bard bardo. Bare nuda. Barefoot nudpiede. Bargain marcxandi. Barge sxargxbarko. Bark (ship) barko. Bark (of dog) hundobleko, bojo. Bark ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... engaged in a parting rally of good-humoured banter; the beaten man said his handsome word; the best man capped it with a compliment to him. They drink of different cups to-day. Both will drink of one cup in the day to come. But the day went too clearly to crown the light and the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of this new Abjuration, Did banter the lawful King of this great Nation: Who call'd God's anointed a foolish old Prig, Was both a base and unmannerly Whigg: But since he is Dead No more shall be said, For he in Repentance has laid down his Head; ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... Bedford Square, and afterwards at the Eoyal Academy Antique School, never, however, going to the Eoyal Academy Life School. He appears to have been an assiduous student. In after life when his habit of late rising had become a stock subject of banter among his intimate friends, he would tell with unwonted pride how in earlier years he used to rise at six A.M. once a week in order to attend a life-class held before breakfast. On such occasions he was accustomed, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... and walked up the street, nodding to an occasional lounger, laughing and talking easily, yet each knew that their banter was a meandering current leading to something deeper which would be sounded before ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... back, and because of Devil Judd's anger at their attempt to capture young Dave, grew wary and rather pacificatory: and so, beyond a little quarrelling, a little threatening and the exchange of a harmless shot or two, sometimes in banter, sometimes in earnest, nothing had been done. Sternly, however, though the Falins did not know the fact, Devil Judd continued to hold aloof in spite of the pleadings of young Dave, and so confident ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... tea-room, in Queen's Gate Terrace," that his "thrilling opportunity" came to sit opposite to Mr. Frederic Harrison, eminent in the eyes of the young American, not for his own sake so much as because recently he had been the subject of Matthew Arnold's banter. Everybody in England, like Mr. Harrison, seemed to Henry James to be somebody, or at least to have been talked about by somebody. They were figures, not cyphers. They were characters in a ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... The Archbishop of Cambray, a man very odious to the liberal party in the provinces, was also bidden to the feast. During the dinner, this prelate, although treated with marked respect by Egmont, was the object of much banter and coarse pleasantry by the ruder portion of the guests. Especially these convivial gentlemen took infinite pains to overload him with challenges to huge bumpers of wine; it being thought very desirable, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... soup in Calais, had we not?" continued Blakeney in the same tone of easy banter, "and wine that I vowed was vinegar. Monsieur... er... Chaubertin... no, no, I beg pardon... Chauvelin... Monsieur Chauvelin and I quite agreed upon that point. The only matter on which we were not quite at one was ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... convert them all," he returned, indulging her in this childish banter. "You see, you converted me with only a few words, and I was a hard ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... sister, was of no consequence at all. Her principal delusion was that she did all the work in the up-stairs rooms of the house, while Martha did it down-stairs. The truth was seen only by the husband, who treated Martha with a kindness that was half banter, half deference. Martha herself had no suspicion that she was the only pillar of the domestic edifice. The situation was without definitions. Martha made definitions, but she devoted them entirely to the Armenians and Griscom and the Chinese and ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... to say," answered the Vicar, accustomed to parry Mr. Toller's banter about his belief in the new medical light. "I am out of the way and ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... that it is a crucifix, and Eugene is going to entrap us into a confession," returned De la Roche, who loved to banter his cousin. ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... on my host, who persisted. I did not want to give myself away, so, simulating a tone of light banter, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... his banter. She needed to ask him no questions about his presence here; his ease of bearing had conveyed to her unconsciously from the first instant that her previous half-contemptuous estimate of him had been altogether wrong ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... tone in which the woman said this left no doubt in the man's mind of her meaning. She was not trifling with him now, he knew. In her low-voiced words he found no trace of banter, of sophistry, nor of aught that he might ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... himself and his substance, did many a time counsel and beseech him to depart Ravenna, and go tarry for a time elsewhere, that so he might at once cool his flame and reduce his charges. For a long while Nastagio answered their admonitions with banter; but as they continued to ply him with them, he grew weary of saying no so often, and promised obedience. Whereupon he equipped himself as if for a journey to France or Spain, or other distant parts, got on horseback and sallied forth of Ravenna, accompanied by not ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... much banter and yet care, Elaine selected one that was indeed a beauty and was about to snap it on her dainty wrist, when ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... by her Northern partners. The Old North State derided the pretensions of the commonwealths that flanked her on either side, and Georgia was not slow to give South Carolina as good as she sent. All this seemed to be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old enough and strong enough to encourage the hopes of the Union leaders that the Confederacy would split along state lines. The cohesive power of the Revolutionary war was not sufficiently strong to ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... good-naturedly at the banter his questions had elicited, and solemnly assured them that there were not men enough in the whole North to take Richmond. Our man was probably misinformed as to who their interlocutor was. General Lee did ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... surprised at his welcoming the English alliance when they had once done nothing but tax him with Anglomania, and had given him the nickname of Milord Risorgimento. He could easily have aroused enthusiasm if, instead of this banter, he had spoken the words of passionate earnestness in which he alluded to his part in the transaction in a letter to Mme. de Circourt. He felt, he said, the tremendous responsibility which weighed on him, and the dangers which might arise from the course adopted, but duty and honour dictated ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... with charms differing but little from that sung by the Syracusan to Lady Selene, and the popular poetry alike of Italy and Greece is full of those delicate touches of refined sentiment that in Theocritus appear so incongruous with the rough coats and rougher banter of the shepherds. For though the poet raised the pastoral life of Sicily into the realms of ideal poetry, he was careful not to dissociate his version from reality, and he allowed no imaginary conceptions to overmaster his art. He depicted no age of innocence; his poetry reflects no philosophical ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Miss Lord, who was governess in a very wealthy household, and liked to talk of the city's prominent families. "Some day you and I will have to find a million dollars and run away for a year in Italy! I wonder, Sue," the mild banter ceased, "if you could get Mary's dinner? I hate to go into the ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... you think I have sense enough to love you," said Fanny, still in a tone of banter. "We part as friends, however, and if you insist on coming to call upon my sister, Mrs Barton, of course I cannot help it, only do not for a moment suppose that I ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... dare say," replied Maud; but though it was couched in a tone of banter, the smile that accompanied this pertinent remark seemed to afford ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... life he could not have kept from doing it. At last he scratched his hand on the pin which was doing duty for the button he had lost in his scuffle with Sleeny. "Ah!" he said to himself, with humorous banter, "it won't do to be married in a coat ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... whether you forgive him or not, Rachel," said Sir William, whose idea of carrying off the situation was to indulge in the time-honoured banter suitable to those about to ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... Clodius attempted to banter his antagonist. "You are a fine gentleman," he said; "you have been at Baiae" (Baiae was a fashionable watering-place on the Campanian coast). "Well," said Cicero, "that is better than to have been at the 'matrons' worship.'" And the attack and repartee went on. "You have bought ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... to Halle the philosopher Wolf, whom his father had banished. Frederick was visited by Voltaire, who at a later day took up his abode for a time with him in Berlin. But the king was fond of banter, and the foibles of each of these companions were a target for the unsparing wit of the other; so that eventually they parted company with mutual disgust. Later they resumed their correspondence, and never wholly lost their intellectual sympathy with each ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... friends loved to tease and banter one another and oftentimes an outsider might have thought from their conversation that they had lost their tempers. Such, however, was never the case. They knew one another too well and all had too ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... like you. You banter me as you use to do. You make a Game of me. You joke upon me. You satyrize me. You treat me with a Sneer. I see how you jeer me well enough. You only jest with me. I am your Laughing-stock. I am laugh'd at by you. You make yourself merry with me. You make a meer Game ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... out a finger vaguely in the direction of Hoddon Grey. And as he spoke all the softness which had gradually penetrated his conversation with Arthur through all his banter, disappeared. His aspect became in a moment ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was idiot enough to let it be known that I was afflicted with an aristocratic name, and I had to hold this job against banter enough to drive a cow daft. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... took it for granted that matters must have gone wrong there, or else he would speak about them, for there had been some gay banter among them concerning the objects of his expedition before he left home. They had heard of the heroine of his Class Day, and they had their doubts of her, such as girls have of their brothers' heroines. They were not inconsolably sorry to have her prove unkind; and their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... these years the name given in jocose banter had clung to him, and now, hallowed by ancient usage, it was accorded to him seriously, and had all the sonorous effect of ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... said Desire, ignoring their banter. "I thought you might have gone for the sermon. The subject was one of ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... but John Beaton was in earnest. In a minute his coat was off, and he set to work with a will. He needed a hint or two, and he got them, with a little banter thrown in. The lad stuck to his work, and could, as his friend said, "do no' that ill." He had perhaps inherited the power to do the work, since he could do it, he thought, and he asked leave to come ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... hat or a morning suit in Monte Carlo," she said, furious at his banter. "Let us talk about ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... her with an amused expression. Evidently they understood each other. As the banter continued, Harvey began to feel uncomfortable. He tried to listen to the orchestra, which ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... of that series of offences which, in the poet's vindictive memory, marked him down for elevation to the throne of Dulness which was rendered vacant by the deposition of King Tibbald."[16] There is a rumour that Gay, in revenge for Cibber's banter of "Three Hours After Marriage," personally chastised the actor-dramatist,[17] but there is nothing definitely known about this. Anyhow, Gay was so irritated by the failure of this play that he did not produce anything at a theatre during the ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... much more agreeably, his impressions seeming to be chiefly gastronomic; he recalled the exquisite flavour of Cyprian hares, the fat francolin, the delicious beccaficoes in commanderia wine; with merry banter from Carnaby, professing to despise a man who knew nothing of game but its taste. The conversation reverted to technicalities of sport, full of terms and phrases unintelligible to Harvey; recounting feats with 'Empress' ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... me what I'd have I took a glass of water. Several of my friends looked inquiringly at me and one asked: "On the wagon?" This attracted the attention of the entire group to my glass of water. I came in for a good deal of banter, mostly along the line that it was time I went on the wagon. This was varied with predictions that I would stay on from an hour to a day or so. I didn't like that talk, but I bluffed it out—weakly, to be sure. I said I had decided it wouldn't do me any ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... rare as a miracle in the hills, and the reason, while clear, was still a mystery: Lum had never been known to look twice at the same woman. He was big, kind, taciturn, ox-eyed, calm. He was so good-natured that anybody could banter him, but nobody ever carried it too far except a bully from an adjoining county one court day. Lum picked him up bodily and dashed him to the ground so that blood gushed from his nose and he lay there bewildered, white, and still. Lum rarely went to church, and he never talked religion, politics, ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... in, hossy?" asked Calvin. He flicked hossy on the ear, but his tone was not the usual one of friendly banter. Hossy shook ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... level with my new and beautiful ally, but even above her, was gained by me in a controversy on professional science, with especial relation to physicians. The countess, in a very spirited bit of banter, ridiculed the whole profession and its science, stating that, in her belief, our entire pathology, therapeutic, etc., was not worth the sand strewn over the prescriptions. She declared that in ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... laughed too, and a little friendly banter was carried on between them, while the curate stood by feeling ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... over Henry, and an attitude of proud reserve had taken the place of the careless banter with which he usually regaled the crew. He married Miss O'Brien in imagination to a strong man of villainous temper and despotic ideas, while the explanations he made to Miss Harcourt were too ingenious and involved to be confined in the ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... some Times, are inconsistent with the Ignorance, Folly and Stupidity they shew at others. It is impossible that Men of Parts, and the least Spirit, how much soever they were in the Wrong, could see themselves defeated, banter'd and exposed with so much Tranquility and Chearfulness; and I can't conceive how any, but egregious Coxcombs, without Sense of Shame, could behave as Alciphron and Lysicles do throughout your Dialogues. They are Fellows without Feeling or Manners. If among Gentlemen there are abandon'd ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... water. The girls are slim, supple and strong as the young men, the mothers and older women rather stiff, and usually hampered by at least one child, which they carry on their backs or on their hips, while another holds on to the garment which replaces our skirts. There is plenty of laughter and banter with the men, who look on unmoved at the efforts of the weaker sex, only rarely offering a ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... for He is He: and if He slay me, I will laugh raillery at His Sword, and banter Him to His face: for His Sword is sharp Mercy, and His poisons kill my death. Fear not, therefore, little flock of Man! but take my comfort to your heart to-night, and my sweets to your tongue: for though ye have sinned, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... small number of passengers, but in spite of the early hour quite a little crowd of people had assembled to witness our departure, and a considerable amount of banter was going on between those on board the sloop and the company ashore, which continued as we moved away, each party trying to get the better of the other. As a finale, one of our passengers shouted to his friend who had come to see him off: "Do you want to buy ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... there was no other house in the place to dispute the title—was filled with men. Some of them were putting up at the hotel while they worked at the new branch line, and some of them had dropped in to exchange news and banter while waiting for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... one by these epigrammatic productions is due probably to a confusion of kinds. Ambiguity of style keeps one in a perpetual state of tension and self-defense; we ought not to be left in doubt whether the speaker is jesting or serious, mocking or tender. Moreover, banter is not humor, and never will be. I think, indeed, that the professional wit finds a difficulty in being genuinely comic, for want of depth and disinterested feeling. To laugh at things and people is not really a joy; it is at best but a cold pleasure. Buffoonery is wholesomer, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was long recognized by even those who differed with him on questions of doctrine as "the most learned, polished and modest spirit that ever separated from the Church of England." To the prepotency of this distinguished divine, General Smith often, in a tone of mingled banter and seriousness, attributed not only his habit of mature reflection and love of learning, but also his "moderation combined with firmness" upon all questions which ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... Christian Revelation.—After shewing, in decent but strong terms, the unfairness of the indirect attempts of modern infidels to unsettle and perplex religious principles, and particularly the irony, banter, and sneer, of one whom he politely calls 'an eloquent historian,' the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... to work, dusting and scrubbing. The girls with their banter put death into the background as an obscure and infrequent incident of ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... another statue was indeed designed for an Antinoues, this was never meant to be anything but a broomstick dressed in your grandfather's cloak, with a lantern in a pumpkin for a head. Oh, the dreariness of having to explain pleasantry! of appending to your banter Artemas Ward's parenthesis, "This is a goak"! of dealing with people who do not know the difference between a blow and a "love-pat," between Quaker guns and an Armstrong battery, between a granite paving-stone and the moonshine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... ought to have realized it was not her own property, but unfortunately didn't. She calmly appropriated the bunch, and distributed it in portions to those nearest her. Peachy's cheeks flamed. She was a hot-tempered little soul underneath her gay banter. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... wall came the gentle slip-slap of the water against the sampan, and the cheerful banter of the owners as they made ready for the ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... a jabber of strange terms, a bright smile and ready banter, and I could see that he was to be a quick favourite. I envied him for his ease of manner, a thing I could never compass. Presently he returned ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... was probably one of the most thoughtful and judiciously-minded; yet of every one but myself the business in being abroad was sober and reasonable, while mine was utterly ridiculous and silly. And the girl whose banter had driven me to it—perhaps she had attached no seriousness whatever to my petulant vow and had even now forgotten it. With these reflections were mingled the pangs of parting from my home and family; and for a time I was downcast ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... among travellers, and asked how far he still had to go to reach the large city. Then she got up and came to him, beautifully her wet mouth was shimmering in her young face. She exchanged humorous banter with him, asked whether he had eaten already, and whether it was true that the Samanas slept alone in the forest at night and were not allowed to have any women with them. While talking, she put her left foot on ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... (money) banko. Bank (river) bordo. Bank (sand) sablajxo. Bank (note) banka bileto. Banker bankiero. Bankrupt bankroto. Bankrupt, to become bankroti. Banner flago, standardo. Banns edzigxanonco. Banquet festeno. Banter moki. Baptism bapto. Baptize bapti. Bar bari. Barbarian barbaro. Barbarism barbarismo. Barber barbiro. Bard bardo. Bare nuda. Barefoot nudpiede. Bargain marcxandi. Barge sxargxbarko. Bark (ship) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... former, among the foremost of whom were Piper and Bart, now crowded eagerly round the cattle, and, after rapidly passing their hands over the cow and each of the oxen a moment, and then stepping back, began to banter and bid. Not much time, however, was allowed them to do either; for the cattle, all at once, became unaccountably restless, at first backing and wheeling about in their confined space, and then wildly tossing up their heads, snuffing, and assuming the startled and furious appearance ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... The thought gave sweetness to their labour, and the responsibilities devolving upon them imbued the sacred holiday with a meaning and charm that it had never had before for them. They bubbled over with importance and with the glory of it. A sister and a brother could not meet without a friendly banter. ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Braund, and Barnes, is a Banter on Criticks, and Genealogists, who make such a Pother about the Orthography of Names and Things, that many Times, three Parts in four of a Folio Treatise, is taken up in ascertaining the Propriety of a Syllable, by which Means the ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... him on this neglect of his studies; but Hoffland always turned aside his advice with some amusing speech, or humorous banter. When the elder student said, "Now, Charles, as your friend I counsel you not to throw away your time and dissipate your mind;" to this Hoffland would reply, "Yes, you are right, Ernest; the morning, as you say, is lovely." Or when Mowbray would say, "Charles, you are incorrigible;" ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... nonsense. I never have had the gift of repartee. I can talk well enough about subjects that interest me when I am conversing with some one whom I know well, but the frothy persiflage, the light banter that forms the conversation's stock in trade of so many women, is an alien ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... were not a little proud of the thickness of the fleeces of their respective flocks and much good-natured banter passed between them. ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... in a tone of banter, loud enough for all to hear; and Captain Roblado wound up his ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... was not his private view Shelton inferred by studying Mr. Dennant's manner in the presence of the vagabond. Underlying the well-bred banter of the tranquil voice, the guarded quizzicality of his pale brown face, it could be seen that Algernon Cuffe Dennant, Esq., J.P., accustomed to laugh at other people, suspected that he was being laughed at. What more natural than that he should grope about to see how this could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... such ideas treasured in his breast, He grew composed, and let his anger rest; Till Counter once (when wine so long went round, That friendship and discretion both were drown'd) Began, in teasing and triumphant mood, His evening banter: —"Of all earthly good, The best," he said, "was an obedient spouse, Such as my friend's—that every one allows: What if she wishes his designs to know? It is because she would her praise bestow; What if she wills that he ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... his face a mask of banter. Of what his actual feelings were at that moment she had ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as if to banter me, and I concluded to accept the challenge. I galloped toward him for fifty yards and he advanced toward me about the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and then, when we were only about thirty yards apart, I raised my rifle and fired; his ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... cloth was removed; but they were by this time become so fond of wine that they would frequently remind me of the health in the middle of dinner by calling out King George Earee no Brittannee; and would banter me if the glass was not filled to the brim. Nothing could exceed the mirth and jollity of these people when they ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... of laughter in the husky voice, now, of a sort of contemptuous banter. But Cairn stolidly shook his ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... perceived first of all that most of the grimness passed away from the narrowed eyes and they lighted instead with good-humoured banter, though of a weary nature. One by one, they cast off ten years of age; the lines rubbed out; the jaws which had thrust out grew normal; the leaning heads straightened and ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... at her a moment in comic dismay. Really this country girl was growing too much for him in his game of banter. ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... outshine anybody else. I kept my Mercutio down all through, so's not to get ahead of Romeo or Tybalt in the public esteem. Did our friends outside the rope catch on to my idea?" Mr. Peck smiled at the banter, but he seemed not to know just what to say, and Putney went on: "That's why I made it so bad. I didn't want anybody to go home feeling sorry that Mercutio was killed. I don't suppose Winthrop could ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... flaming, confused, half-frightened, though a fierce exultation surged within her. She had half expected this, half dreaded it, and now that it had burst upon her in such volcanic fashion she realized that she had not been entirely prepared. She sought refuge in banter, facing him, her cheeks flushed, ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and this was cleverly swung so that it appeared to be caused by a temporary grouch due to the sting of defeat. As the Bar-20 man was known to be given to moods at times this was accepted as the true explanation and gave promise of hotly contested games for revenge later on. The banter which the defeated puncher had to endure stirred him and strengthened the reserve, although he was careful not ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... more than one point of view. At first Lorimer had tried to banter him out of the plan, insisting that the guardianship would be sufficient. There was something in his earnest desire that touched the heart of the man of wide experience. He wondered why he could not be as persistent to win the lady! Perhaps ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... with the miserable, sneaking cur," he said contemptuously. "And you needn't banter me; I've saved you from ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... three years or more Chieftain had always had a good-night pat on the flank from Tim, and in the morning, after the currying and rubbing, they had a little friendly banter, in the way of love-slaps from Tim and good-natured nosings from Chieftain. Perhaps many of Tim's confidences were given half in jest, and perhaps Chieftain sometimes thought that Tim was a bit slow in perception, ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... substituted a bourgeois good-humor which respects the family circle, and haunts the kitchen-stairs; for the biting jeer, intended to make some victim uncomfortable, it gives the sarcastic or sprightly banter, not unconscious of an effort at moral amelioration; for the sententious sagacity, and humorous enjoyment of the nature of man, it gives bright thoughts and a humanitarian sympathy. But, on the whole, the intellectual personality is nearly the same: seeking by natural affinity, and enjoying ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Palmer, in the same grave tone, which might have passed for banter, had Jack ever bantered. "I'll maintain and prove it. I don't see how he can be otherwise. It is as necessary for a man to be a gentleman before he can turn highwayman, as it is for a doctor to have his diploma, or an attorney his certificate. Some of the finest ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... her father in affectionate banter, then, with a wave of her hand and a bright nod to ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... in Peru has been quoted as exhibiting exaggeration in the description of the condor surpassing anything that can be laid to Polo's charge here; but that is, in fact, only somewhat heavy banter directed against our traveller's own narrative. (See Travels in Various Parts ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... off with banter. It was understood that the President should not be told—and that I should not tell him—of my talk with Mr. Sandford. Colonel Lamont undertook to arrange an audience with Mr. Cleveland for me. "You ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... taunt is defiant. The jeer and gibe are uttered; the gibe is bitter, and often sly or covert; the jeer is rude and open. A scoff may be in act or word, and is commonly directed against that which claims honor, reverence, or worship. Compare BANTER. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... for a good talk by the fire. Musq'oosis continued to surprise Sam. On his visit to Nine-Mile Point the old man had been received with good-natured banter, which he returned in kind. Alone with Sam, he came out in quite a ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... her approaches with a banter, and had suffered her to get hold of his hand; but at the mention of the piece of silver, he hemmed, looked grave, and turning to us, asked if we had not better continue our walk. "Come, my master," ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... without committing himself; and, by the time he was well into his fourth tumbler of iced Cogniac and water, he was achieving a rare conversational triumph; for he had left off answering monosyllabically, had volunteered an observation or two, and even ventured to banter his companions about their not availing themselves sufficiently of the sporting resources ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... figure approaching with a package under his arm, which from frequent reappearances had become easily recognizable; but as a person becomes accustomed to a physical deformity, Calmar Bye had ceased to notice banter. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... for pretending that he had known this, and he as good-humouredly accepted their banter. He drew a serious long breath of relief, however, when their backs were turned. It had gone off much ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... abuse, but he persisted,—a serious undertone to his banter. "Yes, I have always observed the scepticism of youth, no matter what may be the age of the contracting parties and their previous experience, in this matter. But Love and Marriage are two distinct and ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... that she would cease her banter, and he had another subject to advance, which he now brought forward abruptly. "I don't know, Miss Rexford, what right I have to think you will take any interest in what interests me, but, after what happened last night, I can't help telling you that I've got to the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... just after dark, as the Overlanders enjoyed sitting about their campfire in the cool evening air, chatting and telling stories and indulging in good-natured banter as they ate. They had just sat down when a voice from the darkness brought instant silence, and a quick reaching for their weapons. The nerves of the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... have learnt from him in some parts. The audience was not a pleasant one to face. It was the First Consul's habit to invite forty persons to dinner, and a hundred and fifty for the evening, and consequently to hear, criticise, and banter us without mercy" (Memoirs of Duchesse d'Abrantes, tome ii. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... this line of defense. Possibly her explanation, whatever it was, had seemed convincing when she poured it out to him in the heat of their first private colloquy; but now that it was exposed to the cold daylight of judicial scrutiny, and the banter of the town, he was thoroughly ashamed of it, and would have sacrificed her without a scruple to save his professional reputation. But the obstinate Judge—who perhaps, after all, was more inquisitive than kindly—evidently wanted to ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... a tinge of feeling beneath his banter—"you've added to the list to-night, and I wish you joy of your acquisition! But don't say I ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... already gone through the service once since his ordination; and upon this being understood, he had a variety of questions from Crawford as to his feelings and success; questions, which being made, though with the vivacity of friendly interest and quick taste, without any touch of that spirit of banter or air of levity which Edmund knew to be most offensive to Fanny, he had true pleasure in satisfying; and when Crawford proceeded to ask his opinion and give his own as to the properest manner in which particular passages in the service should be delivered, shewing ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... in detail on any topic of the time; though it was plain that he courted inquiry and remark, which to a certain extent was necessary to the full and pleasant exercise of his faculties. But it was infinitely amusing to hear him banter an obstinate old lawyer on a point of law, catching at his arguments before he had half uttered them, and dissecting them with such wonderful dexterity that the listeners, shaking with laughter, saw, probably for the first ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... earth. They knew this over the Stone Coal; the club-footed giant Malan had a lot of scars under his shirt that were not born on him. And there was Ump, a crooked thing of a man truly, but a crooked thing of a man that would hobnob with the king of all the fiends, banter for banter, and in whose breast cowardice was as ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... every alley. They had had a glorious lark; somewhere beyond would be the piper with an appalling bill. They exaggerated the dangers, multiplied them; perhaps wisely. There would be no let-down in their vigilance until they reached haven. But this state of mind they covered with smiling masks, banter, bursts of ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... young people took part jointly in many affairs, but Bob got Marjorie to himself as much as possible. The others chaffed them a good deal, but as the banter was all good-natured, it ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... while the younger ones, and especially the children, were full of mirth and jollity, challenging each other to trials of speed and skill, laughing good-naturedly at little mishaps, and exchanging jests and good humored banter. ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... Necker were nothing to this. God is great; and when a scandal is to end, brings some devoted man to take charge of it in hope, not in despair!"—But cannot he reform? asked many simple persons;—to whom our friend in grim banter would reply: "Reform a Popedom,—hardly. A wretched old kettle, ruined from top to bottom, and consisting mainly now of foul grime and rust: stop the holes of it, as your antecessors have been doing, with temporary putty, it may hang together ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... lurking in the neighborhood. Still they went on, forgetting their danger in the enjoyment of shooting ducks. Finally, however, one of the party said he would not go further, and the other joined him. This led Radisson to banter them, saying that he would go ahead and kill ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... delight she never once looked toward the beach, and I maintained the banter with such success all unconsciously she sipped coffee from the china cup, ate fried evaporated potatoes, and spread marmalade on her biscuit. But it could not last. I saw the surprise that came over her. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... women looked at Phil more closely. She seemed preoccupied and her contributions to their banter were perfunctory and spiritless. When they were established in the living-room, Phil crouched on a stool by the fire. Concealment and dissimulation were so wholly foreign to her nature that it was with difficulty that she resisted ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of Artemus Ward, apparently edited by Mr. John Camden Hotten (Chatto and Windus), this passage is accompanied with the following gloss: "Here again Artemus called in the aid of pleasant banter as the most fitting apology for the atrocious ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the evening. Ward had appointed him to order the dinner, and he had attended to this duty without mingling much in the conversation. When Ward asked him why he did not join the banter, he said: ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with stout cords, for the present," cried the lieutenant, returning no answer to the banter of Nosey, who fired with indignation at ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... that knock'd? What, not a word! Suppose I banter him a little. He deserves it, For never trusting this affair to me. ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... comes with megaphone and specious cheer. His troupe, too fat or short or long or lean, Step from the pages of the magazine With slapstick or sombrero or with cane: The rube, the cowboy or the masher vain. They over-act each part. But at the height Of banter and of canter and delight The masks fall off for one queer instant there And show real faces: faces full of care And desperate longing: love that's hot or cold; And subtle thoughts, and countenances bold. The masks go back. 'Tis one more joke. Laugh on! The goodly grown-up ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... Colonel Campion sat in heavy silence, and Olga instinctively held aloof. There was something in Max's attitude that puzzled her, but it was something so intangible that she could not even vaguely define it to herself. All his careless banter notwithstanding, she was fully convinced in her own mind that he was not in the smallest degree dazzled or so much as attracted by the brilliant beauty that so dominated her own imagination. Though he laughed and joked in his customary cynical strain, she ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... return to Piero Torrigiani, who, with my drawing in his hand, spoke as follows: "This Buonarroti and I used, when we were boys, to go into the Church of the Carmine, to learn drawing from the chapel of Masaccio. [1] It was Buonarroti's habit to banter all who were drawing there; and one day, among others, when he was annoying me, I got more angry than usual, and clenching my fist, gave him such a blow on the nose, that I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles; and this mark of mine he will carry ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... he invites the statue to sup with him that night. At midnight Don Juan and his friends are making merry when a knock is heard at the door and the stone guest enters. Don Juan, who does not lose his bravery even in the presence of the supernatural, plays the host, maintaining his air of insulting banter. At the end of the evening the guest departs, offering to repay the hospitality the following night if Don Juan will visit his tomb at midnight. Though friends try to dissuade him, Don Juan fearlessly accepts ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... "They banter me; but enough; I am to blame for discoursing upon the deep world wherein I live. I am wrong in seeking to invest sublunary sounds with celestial sense. Much that is in me is incommunicable by this ether we breathe. But I ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the next morning there was a little banter on the subject of painting. Could not the distinguished painter remain over one day and give his hosts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... banter ceased, for the sergeant's men passed through the swing gate, and to Waller's great relief he was able to make his way back to the hall, very silent now as he went over the day's proceedings, and ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... George took their rough banter in excellent part. He sipped his beer, and grinned like a cat at his own expense. But after the guffaws had subsided, he said, "Thee's not told un about that ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... boys who had in them a spark of sense or honour very soon abandoned this system of torment, and made up for it as far as they could by respect and kindness, which always, however, took more or less the form of banter. It is not to be expected that boys will ever be made to see that steady, strenuous industry, even when it fails, is a greater and a better thing than idle cleverness, but those few who were so far in advance of their years as to have some intuition ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... of the frenzy of Mr. John Dennis," published in the Miscellanies of Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, and said to have been written by Pope, is a grave banter on his usual violence. It professes to be the account of the physician who attended him at the request of a servant, who describes the first attack of his madness coming on when "a poor simple child came to him from the printers; the boy had no sooner entered the room, but he ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... life; he liked to ride rough-shod; he was never pleased when his path crossed people over whom he could not ride rough-shod. Generally she had accepted his classification of those who opposed him strongly as "blamed idiots"; sometimes with a little of her laughing banter, but usually, his superiority standing out sharp and clear when opposed to the dull Canaanites, endorsing his opinion. "I sort of wish," he went on, with that keen, wire-edged exasperation still sawing in his voice, "that you wouldn't have much to do with that chap. He isn't my kind of people. I ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... "the vast and luminous balloon of transformism (evolution), in order to empty it and expose it in all its inanity." (9/12.) By no means the least original feature of his work is this passionate and incisive argument, in which, with a remarkable power of dialectic, and at times in a tone of lively banter, he endeavoured to remove "this comfortable pillow from those who have not the courage to inquire into its fundamental nature." He attacked these "adventurous syntheses, these superb and supposedly philosophic deductions," all the more eagerly because he himself had an unshakable faith in the absolute ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... Patteson far more than in jesting with y^e king, whom he alwaies looks on as a lion that may, any minute, fall on him and rend him. Whereas, with 'tother, he ungirds his mind. Their banter commonly exceeds not plesantrie, but Patteson is ne'er without an answer, and although, maybe, each amuses himselfe now and then with thinking, "I'll put him up with such a question," yet, once begun, the skein ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... each of them are nothing else but science.' 'You are munificent indeed,' said Socrates; 'for when asked for one thing, you have given many.' I almost think," continued Harrington, "that, if Socrates were here, he would do what I should not presume to do,—banter you in a somewhat similar way. He would say, that, having asked what a miracle was, Mr. Fellowes told him that half a dozen things were miracles, but did not tell him what every miracle was; that is, never told him what made all miracles ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... mocking spirit with clever imitations of the style and affectations of familiar poets. They are witty; they are humorous; they are good-natured; and they are artistic and extraordinarily clever. His satirical banter shown in these verses—most of which are real poems as well as parodies—has been classed as "refined common-sense," and "the exuberant playfulness of a powerful mind and tender and manly nature." It contains also independent literary skits ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... stamping his foot, "thinkest thou to banter me,—see!" As his foot shook the floor, the door opened, and a man with his arms bare, covered from head to foot in a black gown of serge, with his features concealed by a hideous mask, stood ominously ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... difficulty in keeping their buggy in sight. Sometimes Bartley stopped long enough for them to come up, and then, after a word or two of gay banter, was ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... he may have had of passing unobserved. She was glad of the opportunity to show the company that she was on familiar terms with a man so well known, and she had on her tongue what she regarded as a piece of banter quite in keeping with ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... the young fellow retorted, and their banter took a course that left Miss Axewright and Gaites to themselves. The dancers began to stray in again from ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... Travels in Peru has been quoted as exhibiting exaggeration in the description of the condor surpassing anything that can be laid to Polo's charge here; but that is, in fact, only somewhat heavy banter directed against our traveller's own narrative. (See Travels in Various Parts ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... he could not see her face. It was very cruel in him, but he deliberately took her chin in his hands, and gently but firmly turned her face up to his. Then, as he kissed the shamed eyes and furiously blushing cheeks, he dropped the tone of banter and said, with moist eyes, in a voice of ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... barely made good our retreat when the boat arrived alongside, and her occupants were in another moment in possession of the felucca's deck. A torrent of ribald banter and raillery—of the sort which, coming from a drunken man, is expected to be received as jovial humour, but which a chance word or inadvertent glance of misappreciation may in a moment cause to be exchanged ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... back a well-heeled bird, nor to color my fancy for a horse. As for a mistress, or for those fugitive affairs of the heart which English fashion countenanced—nay, on which fashion insisted—I had no part in them, and brooked much banter from the gay world in consequence. It was not merely lack of money, nor yet a certain fastidiousness implanted, nor yet the inherent shrinking of my English blood from pleasure forbidden, for my Renault blood was hot enough, God wot! It was, I think, all of these ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... horse back and forth in front of his men, as if to banter me, and I concluded to accept the challenge. I galloped towards him for fifty yards and he advanced towards me about the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and then, when we were only about thirty yards apart, I raised my rifle and fired; his ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... quiet during the evening. Ward had appointed him to order the dinner, and he had attended to this duty without mingling much in the conversation. When Ward asked him why he did not join the banter, he said: ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... although there is a pleasing relish on the curb at his discomfort, yet it must not be assumed that all the humor on the street rises from misadventure. Rather, it arises from a general acceptance of the day and a feeling of common partnership in the storm. The policeman in his rubber coat exchanges banter with a cab-driver. If there is a tangle in the traffic, it comes nearer to a jest than on a fairer day. A teamster sitting dry inside his hood, whistles so cheerily that he can be heard at the farther sidewalk. Good-naturedly he sets his tune as a ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... well! This is like you. You banter me as you use to do. You make a Game of me. You joke upon me. You satyrize me. You treat me with a Sneer. I see how you jeer me well enough. You only jest with me. I am your Laughing-stock. I am laugh'd at by you. ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... questions about their subject their answer was—not always—but in so many cases a solemn owllike "yes-and-no" that I soon learned my place. They did not expect or want a woman to know anything and preferred light banter and persiflage. I like that, too, when it is well done; but I was accustomed to ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... allowed it to pass, as she thought it might be construed either as a compliment or a banter. Visitors flocked in, and the insufferable Mrs. Downe Wright declared to all that her Ladyship was astonishingly well; but without the appropriate whine, which gives proper pathos, and generally accompanies ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... foolish banter merely to show how safely, even on his most sensitive points, one might ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sort of thing. But to a certain extent he had laid himself open to banter by the lasting character of his impressions which were connected with the passion of love and, perhaps, were not of such a rare kind as he seemed to think them. What made his comrades tolerant of his rhapsodies was the fact that they were connected ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... ears instead of their nose; and blotches of breast-pin. Pictures on the wall cut out of the Police Gazette. A slush of beer on floor and counter. A pistol falls out of a ruffian's pocket. By the gas-light a knife flashes. Low songs. They banter, and jeer, and howl, and vomit. An awful goal, to which hundreds of people better than you ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the boys should drive away Little sweet maidens from the play, Or love to banter and fight so well, That's the thing I ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... say," replied Maud; but though it was couched in a tone of banter, the smile that accompanied this pertinent remark seemed ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... carried on in low tones, had passed under cover of noisy mirth, snatches of song, banter, and gigglings; nobody paid heed to the two men talking in a corner. Yet the stranger lowered his voice to a ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... merry banter faded from the Virile Benedict's brown eyes, and was replaced by the commanding look of one who has taken a brilliant degree in all ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... with a laugh the cool, light scorn of her banter. Yet something in him warmed to his environment. He had the feeling of having come into more intimate touch with her past than he had yet done. The sight of that plain little bed went to the source of his emotions. How many times had his love knelt beside it in her night-gown and offered up ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... always clever enough to make her believe that he trembled like a college youth who asks his first partner at a ball: "Do you like dancing?" But he could also be terrible when necessary; he could draw his sword and destroy skilled soldiers. There was banter in his simplicity and laughter in his tears, for he could weep as well as any woman who says to her husband: "Give me a carriage or I ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... young, and backward; but he had a temper, and this kind of banter roused it easily. The red ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... the same token you are all sweetness and blue eyes and dearness and dimples," he punished her. Then the banter in his tones died ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... to detect how much of conviction and how much of banter there was in his treatment of men engaged in the actual intellectual movement of our times. I found such to be the case in my own intercourse with him. He always attacked me in a bantering way, but, I thought, half in earnest ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... is that it is really schoolboy humour belatedly prolonged. Vituperation is the schoolboy's idea of friendly banter. The schoolboy does not so much consider the feelings of his victim as his companions' need for amusement. But I am sure that the tendency nowadays is, somehow or other, to prolong the hobbledehoy days. There is so much more organisation ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rolls his eye at you when he wins," explained Judge Colfax as we went out into the sunlit street again, and he patted me on the shoulder in gentle banter. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... exclaims. From the high rostra a report comes down, And like a chilly fog, pervades the town: Each man I meet accosts me "Is it so? You live so near the gods, you're sure to know: That news about the Dacians? have you heard No secret tidings?" "Not a single word." "O yes! you love to banter us poor folk." "Nay, if I've heard a tittle, may I choke!" "Will Caesar grant his veterans their estates In Italy, or t'other side of the straits?" I swear that I know nothing, and am dumb: They think me deep, miraculously mum. And ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... the handle of her parasol. Here was her lover saying to her all that she had dreamed he might say, saying in an earnest, trembling voice that he loved her; in a voice so different to his customary tone of banter, that she for a moment almost believed in his sincerity; yet as she averted her face and looked over the bay she could see clearly in her mind's eye the little picture which had remained in it from yesterday—her lover holding ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... of talk was a sample of life at Temple Camp for seven days past. Those who were not given to jollying and banter had fallen back on checkers and dominos and other wild sports. A few of the more adventurous and reckless made birchbark ornaments, while those who were in utter despair for something to ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... due to the sting of defeat. As the Bar-20 man was known to be given to moods at times this was accepted as the true explanation and gave promise of hotly contested games for revenge later on. The banter which the defeated puncher had to endure stirred him and strengthened the reserve, although he was careful not ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... example the "Io son si vaga della mia bellezza." To this all the others spontaneously dance while singing the refrain in chorus. Another time the queen of the day, Emilia, invites Dioneo to sing a canzona. There is much pretty banter, while Dioneo teases the women by making false starts at several then familiar songs. In another place Dioneo with lute and Fiametta with viol play a dance. Again one sings while Dioneo accompanies her ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... truth, cogency of logical reason. Those who insist on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and fine exquisiteness of suggestion, are disappointed in Burke: they even find him stiff and over-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said, and often unseasonable. As is usual with a man who has not true humour, Burke is also without true pathos. The thought of wrong or misery moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger against the cause. Again, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... contemptuous term "square-head" to his competitors from northern Europe. The word "Boche" cannot be translated by anything except "Boche," any more than our word "Wop," meaning an Italian, can be turned into French. The same attitude, half banter, half race contempt, lies at the heart of ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... gave sweetness to their labour, and the responsibilities devolving upon them imbued the sacred holiday with a meaning and charm that it had never had before for them. They bubbled over with importance and with the glory of it. A sister and a brother could not meet without a friendly banter. ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... ditto of yellow soap, a comb and brush for the head, and nothing for the teeth. Everybody uses the comb and brush, except myself. Everybody stares to see me using my own; and two or three gentlemen are strongly disposed to banter me on my prejudices, but don't. When I have made my toilet, I go upon the hurricane-deck, and set in for two hours of hard walking up and down. The sun is rising brilliantly; we are passing Mount Vernon, where Washington ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... Senate, which illustrious body he had on all occasions deliberately treated with contumely and hatred,—but to the private revenge of an insulted soldier. The weak thin voice of Cassius Chaereas, tribune of the praetorian cohort, had marked him out for the coarse and calumnious banter of the imperial buffoon; and he determined to avenge himself, and at the same time rid the world of a monster. He engaged several accomplices in the conspiracy, which was nearly frustrated by their want of resolution. For four whole days they hesitated, while day after day, Caius ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... the Calvinistic faith, which Kennedy upheld without stint. The Conversations add little to what we already know of Byron's religious opinions; nor is it easy to say where he ceases to be serious and begins to banter, or vice versa. He evidently wished to show that in argument he was good at fence, and could handle a theologian as skilfully as a foil. At the same time he wished if possible, though, as appears, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... confession. St Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, have not quite equalled this. He found it had been made the subject of serious criticism and ludicrous banter. But his one object, as he tells 'serious criticks,' has been to delineate Johnson's character, and for this purpose he appeals from Philip drunk to Philip sober, and to the approbation of the discerning reader. Later ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... There was none of the bluster of the armchair Jingo, none of the loud hectoring and swaggering and bravado that distinguish the carpet warrior. On the contrary, when they were talking of the war amongst themselves they had an air of quiet determination, of good-humoured banter, and of easy, serious confidence far more ominous for an enemy than any amount of fluent rant. After the world of politics, with its hair-splitting and word-mincing, it was good to be with soldiers—the men who do the work. They knew no fine political shades, they bandied ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... stroll out to them after his daily visit, and lying on the grass, his arms crossed behind his head, and a big cigar between his lips, would gently banter everybody. Tea came at five o'clock, and then Mrs. Decie appeared armed with a magazine or novel, for she was proud of her literary knowledge. The sitting was suspended; Harz, with a cigarette, would move between the table and the picture, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... elapsed before down the hill came Grace and Skeets, the latter stumbling several times, nearly pitching headlong and yet most mirthful over her own near misfortune; but little Miss Hooper seemed unusually serious-minded. A lively exchange of jests and jolly banter commenced between Skeets and Gus, who could use his tongue if forced to; but presently Grace left her laughing chum and came over to where Bill had resumed ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... transcribe, from his excellent work, a distinguished passage in support of the Christian Revelation. After shewing, in decent but strong terms, the unfairness of the INDIRECT attempts of modern infidels to unsettle and perplex religious principles, and particularly the irony, banter, and sneer, of one whom he politely calls 'an eloquent historian', ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... jocular mask—one might have counted him the most serene and careless of vagrants, and in his words only the ordinary voice of banter spoke to the Governor. A good woman, it may well be, would have guessed before this the sensitive soul in the blundering body, but Barker saw just the familiar, whimsical, happy-go-lucky McLean of old days, and so he went gayly and innocently on, treading upon holy ground. "I've got it!" ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... steps of the Piazzetta to receive the oncoming barges, for the "Calza" were the very darlings of their eyes, and never had they been more brilliant. With true Venetian comradery the crowd tossed them light banter on the names of their divisions, with pantomimic interpretation, in ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... conversation, books, and newspapers. The Dutchman hates to be interfered with, and resents the advice of candid friends, and cannot stand any 'chaff.' He has his kind of humour, which is slow in expression and material in conception, but he does not understand 'banter.' He is liberal in theories, but intensely conservative in practice. He will agree with a new theory, but often do as his grandfather did, and so in Holland there may be seen very primitive methods ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... girls are slim, supple and strong as the young men, the mothers and older women rather stiff, and usually hampered by at least one child, which they carry on their backs or on their hips, while another holds on to the garment which replaces our skirts. There is plenty of laughter and banter with the men, who look on unmoved at the efforts of the weaker sex, only rarely offering a ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... The donkey was enjoying it. I think he was asleep!" The day had been an unusually hard one, and the patient little schoolmistress was just then struggling with a distracted sense of unavailing effort. Arnold's grim banter had brought the tears, as blood follows a blow. He got down from his horse, looking wretched at what he had done. "I am a brute, I believe,—worse than any of the pack. You have so much patience with them,—please have a little with me. Trust me, I am not utterly blind to ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... with a jabber of strange terms, a bright smile and ready banter, and I could see that he was to be a quick favourite. I envied him for his ease of manner, a thing I could never compass. Presently he returned ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... he swallowed. "Heard you ever anything to equal that? He has the appearance of a boy who has been released from a lesson. I wish that you had been here to see him at meal-time. So full of jests and banter was he that I could scarcely eat for laughing. Yet when I took courage from his good-nature to ask him concerning his plans for the future, he pretended that he did not hear me, and put an end to questioning by bidding Ulf come ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... glasses" always. Our discourse was generally composed of much lighter elements, especially when Mr Mawley and I did not come in contact—argument being then, naturally, as a dead letter. Our conversation during these peaceful interregnums mainly consisted in friendly banter, parish news, and gossip. Scandal Miss Pimpernell never permitted; indeed, no one would have had the heart to say an ill-natured thing of anybody ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... pursued the nephew, with a short laugh, relapsing into that light tone of banter which was his most natural mode of expression; "when, one fine day, a hired coach clattered up Sir Rupert Landale's avenue and deposited upon his porch a tattered mariner who announced himself, in melancholy tones that would have befitted the ghost no doubt many took him for, as the rightful ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... smartened attire and doleful countenance that an affair of the heart was forward. And 'twas true; 'twas safely to be predicted, indeed, in season and out, of the fool of our harbor: for what with his own witless conjectures and the reports of his mates, made in unkind banter, his leisure was forever employed in the unhappy business: so that never a strange maid came near but he would go shyly forth upon his quest, persuaded of a grateful issue. 'Twas heroic, I thought, and by this, no less than by his attachment, he ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... cap something perfectly funny with something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation. Dryden does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. But sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders. Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of her own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... swilling mob are employing their muddled minds on frivolity or obscenity, or worse things still. You will hear hardly an intelligent word; you will not catch a sound of sensible discussion; the scraps of conversation that reach you alternate between low banter, low squabbling, objectionable narrative, and histories of fights or swindles ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... morning there was a little banter on the subject of painting. Could not the distinguished painter remain over one day and give his hosts a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... he might tax her, if possible, with a humorous attitude toward the preacher or a quizzical treatment of his flock. He had not yet pardoned her "ways" along Main Street, on the occasion of one or two shopping excursions. She had not hesitated to banter the admiring young clerks that held their places behind those shop-fronts of galvanized iron in simulation of red brick and of cut limestone, and she had been startlingly free in her accosting of several time-honoured ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... taught him rhythm, Prior ease, Praed buoyancy and banter; What modern bard would learn from these? ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... she said to her father in affectionate banter, then, with a wave of her hand and a bright nod to Mr. Turner, ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... visitors had observed that we always drank His Majesty's health as soon as the cloth was removed; but they were by this time become so fond of wine that they would frequently remind me of the health in the middle of dinner by calling out King George Earee no Brittannee; and would banter me if the glass was not filled to the brim. Nothing could exceed the mirth and jollity of these people when they ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddly enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that The League of Youth was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps, like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his own language; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catching but faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did not realize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of "de ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the only philosophers, and whenever he is combating Epicureanism his language is that of a Stoic. Some of Vergil's most eloquent passages seem to be inspired by Stoic speculation. Even Horace, despite his banter about the sage, in his serious moods borrows the language of the Stoics. It was they who inspired the highest flights of declamatory eloquence in Persius and Juvenal. Their moral philosophy affected the world through Roman law, the great masters of which were brought up under its influence. So ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... as yet touched it. Wise people said that when she did fall in love sparks would fly. Hitherto her friendships with men, whatever the men in question may have wished, had existed upon a basis of good-natured banter and prowess in games. Men were absolutely necessary to Miss Blythe to play games with, because women who could "give her a game" were rare as ivory-billed woodpeckers. It was even thought by some, as an instance, that little Miss Blythe ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... to serve at the ready-set tea-table as a butt for banter; otherwise it was apprehended well that Mrs. Sumfit would have scorched the ears of all present, save the happy veteran of the furrows, with repetitions of Dahlia's name, and wailings about her darling, of whom no one spoke. They suffered from her in spite ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... weeks; they vext the souls of deans; They rode; they betted; made a hundred friends, And caught the blossom of the flying terms, But missed the mignonette of Vivian-place, The little hearth-flower Lilia. Thus he spoke, Part banter, part affection. 'True,' she said, 'We doubt not that. O yes, you missed us much. I'll stake my ruby ring upon ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... think, sir, that I have wasted my time!" rejoined Lecoq in a tone of angry banter, a scarlet flush mantling at the same time over his features. "Such is not my opinion. This scrap of paper undeniably proves that if any one has been mistaken as regards the prisoner's identity, it is ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... welcome the newcomers. They were four of the Mill girls and they crowded into the room, staring curiously about them and at Robin, whose greeting they answered awkwardly. Spying Adam Kraus, they rushed to him with noisy banter and laughter that ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... all their banter the old windmill, perhaps because it was the only thing stirring, held them and sobered their thoughts as it would not have done elsewhere. Perhaps they felt a sort of consciousness of its lonely position and fancied ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... thus disdainful," said the Queen, in a gay tone of banter; "give me here this poor token that thou dost so despise, when many a maiden would be distraught with delight and gratitude. Let ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... subject to athletics, and was in the highest spirits the rest of the day; but underneath all his fun and banter the question constantly arose in his inner consciousness: How could he elude his roommate's watchfulness and on the coming Saturday escape ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... was not himself. He liked an engagement of banter; it amused him to call out Irene's spirit, and to conquer in the end by masculine force in guise of affectionate tolerance. To-day he seemed dull, matter-of-fact, inclined to vexation; when not ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... the field on the other side of the heap; but his jest failed. The earnestness and devout emotion of the boy to the vision of reality which his imagination, aided by the hues of sunset, had thus exalted, were too much for the gross spirit of banter, and the speaker shrank back into his dust-hovel, and affected to be very assiduous in his work as the day was drawing to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... rough banter in excellent part. He sipped his beer, and grinned like a cat at his own expense. But after the guffaws had subsided, he said, "Thee's not told un about that five pound yet, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... about in congratulation and good-humored banter. Everybody was glad of the boy's success, he was an all round favorite, and some of the men who had won his money felt ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... and Barnes, is a Banter on Criticks, and Genealogists, who make such a Pother about the Orthography of Names and Things, that many Times, three Parts in four of a Folio Treatise, is taken up in ascertaining the Propriety of a Syllable, by which Means the Reader is left undetermined; having nothing but the various Readings ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... other's society. To Phillis his relation continued that of an elder brother: he directed her studies into new paths, he patiently drew out the expression of many of her thoughts, and perplexities, and unformed theories—scarcely ever now falling into the vein of banter which she was so ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... regarded it rather as owing to his own hurried and unfinished declaration. It was true that he hadn't said half what he intended to say; it was true that she might have misunderstood it as the conventional gallantry of the situation, as—terrible thought!—the light banter of the habitual love-making American, to which she had been accustomed; perhaps even now she relegated him to the level of Greyson, and this accounted for her singular impassiveness—an impassiveness that ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... gravely to the swains in turn, and makes demure but provoking answers, raising each to the height of hope, and then casting them both down into the depths of despair; finally she refuses both, yet without altogether killing hope. Her first answer is a good specimen of her banter and of ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... laughed, ready to be pleased at the smallest joke, and banter was the only form of humour ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... badinage to all corners of the room. Afterward, as they wheeled from time to time in their chairs, they bitterly insulted each other with the utmost good-nature, taking unerring aim at faults and riddling personalities with the quaint and cynical humour of a newspaper office. Throughout this banter, it was strange to note how infrequently the men smiled, particularly when ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... the victor and vanquished as they walked slowly back to the marquees; but it was with somewhat of a crestfallen air that Montague advanced to present Sylla with the cup that she had won. He feared that she would be merciless in this her hour of triumph, and dreaded the banter to which he might be subjected. But Sylla knew well the virtue of moderation, and was, besides, far too pleased with her success to be hard ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... speak to him, then? for you see I am in no need of help," retorted Phillis, who was sore all over, and wanted to get rid of him, and yet would have been offended if he had taken her at her word. But Mr. Drummond, who felt his position an uncomfortable one, and was dreadfully afraid of the colonel's banter, was not mean enough to take advantage of her dismissal. He had joined himself to her company out of pure good nature, for it was a hot day and the parcel was heavy, but she would have none of ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... then, and makes his main attacks on my logic and metaphysics. He says, that in writing his first book, he knew no characteristics of me, except that I was "a gentleman, a scholar, and a very indifferent metaphysician" At the risk of encountering yet more of banter and insult, I shall here quote what the third "Prospective Reviewer" says on this topic. (Vol. x. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... slow recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he deified ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... burying her nose in it, passed it to Irene. The latter ought to have realized it was not her own property, but unfortunately didn't. She calmly appropriated the bunch, and distributed it in portions to those nearest her. Peachy's cheeks flamed. She was a hot-tempered little soul underneath her gay banter. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... never would be an end to the stream of leisurely people who answered his banter with laugh and joke. But finally the last of them were fairly on the stair, and he turned to Agnes Maine with ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... it lovely for the people who can do those things!" said Miss Lord, who was governess in a very wealthy household, and liked to talk of the city's prominent families. "Some day you and I will have to find a million dollars and run away for a year in Italy! I wonder, Sue," the mild banter ceased, "if you could get Mary's dinner? I hate to go into the kitchen, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... would be the very last thing we should ever think of doing. The officer went on ahead quite unconvinced and in high dudgeon. That we should select one of the myrmidons of the All-Highest as a target for our banter was the offence of offences in his estimable conceit. When we reached the entrance to the field we had to pass a small office in which we were registered and we discovered the immature upstart loudly and excitedly dwelling ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... walls. But Richard, for this present whim of his, chose out a companion devil as heedless as himself, Mercadet namely, his brown Gascon captain, of like proportions, like mettle, like foolhardiness; and with him made the daily round, never omitting an exchange of grim banter with Saint-Pol. It was terrible to see him, without helm on his head, or reason in it, canter within range of ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... banks of the Rhine. The three Rhine-maidens are disporting themselves in the river while they lament the loss of their beautiful treasure. Siegfried, who has strayed from his companions in the chase, now appears, and they beg him for the ring upon his finger, at first with playful banter, and afterwards in sober earnest, warning him that if he does not give it back to them he will perish that very day. He laughs at their womanly wiles, and they vanish as his comrades appear. After the midday halt, Siegfried tells Gunther and his vassals the story of his life. In the midst ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... promise, thus committing the first of that series of offences which, in the poet's vindictive memory, marked him down for elevation to the throne of Dulness which was rendered vacant by the deposition of King Tibbald."[16] There is a rumour that Gay, in revenge for Cibber's banter of "Three Hours After Marriage," personally chastised the actor-dramatist,[17] but there is nothing definitely known about this. Anyhow, Gay was so irritated by the failure of this play that he did not produce anything at a theatre ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... rough-shod over inferior men all his life; he liked to ride rough-shod; he was never pleased when his path crossed people over whom he could not ride rough-shod. Generally she had accepted his classification of those who opposed him strongly as "blamed idiots"; sometimes with a little of her laughing banter, but usually, his superiority standing out sharp and clear when opposed to the dull Canaanites, endorsing his opinion. "I sort of wish," he went on, with that keen, wire-edged exasperation still sawing ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... laughing. He was a singular man in all respects; he might not have been quite in earnest, but that the short, hard, rapid manner in which he shot out these cinders of principles, as if it were done by mechanical revolvency, seemed irreconcilable with banter. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... his gay banter in monosyllables, and kept her dancing eyes veiled by their own long-fringed lids, but this only ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... upon us, the town," says the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1752, "has been lately entertained with a kind of farcical performance, called 'The Old Woman's Oratory,' conducted by Mrs. Mary Midnight and her family, intended as a banter on Henley's Oratory, and a puff for the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... indeed, at the time when he sent me those melancholy verses, "There's not a joy this world can give," &c. felt some vague apprehensions as to the mood into which his spirits then seemed to be sinking, and, in acknowledging the receipt of the verses, thus tried to banter him out of it:—"But why thus on your stool of melancholy again, Master Stephen?—This will never do—it plays the deuce with all the matter-of-fact duties of life, and you must bid adieu to it. Youth is the only time when ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Nae banter frae Lord Deas, Nae promises o' fees That never will be paid afore the judgment-day, Nae lies dubbed "information," From the worst rogues in the nation,— The days o' my Circuits are a' ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... the evening passed with the banter that invariably took place when Rube was of the party. It was late when they left the Squire's, the constable going along with them, and all singing merrily as ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... cheered and inspired him to know that his country was represented in the fighting. He had to pause in the street to let a company of them pass by on their way northward to the trench line and it did his heart good to hear their cheery laughter and typical American banter. ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... blue-birds, warblers of many species, sparrows of different kinds, shore birds and ducks, the sweet-songed thrushes. Little tepid breezes wandered up and down, warm in contrast to the faint snow-chill that even yet lingered in the shadows. Sounds carried clearly, so that the shouts and banter of the rivermen were plainly audible up the reaches of the river. Ashore moist and aggressive green things were pushing up through the watery earth from which, in shade, the last frost had not yet departed. At camp the fires ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... I fancy they have had a talking-to that they won't forget in a hurry. So they have been well punished, and Tommy has been wired to to come home at once, so he has been punished. And Hilary's punishment here is to come. It will take the form of such endless banter and chaff from her brothers and sisters that it will be a long time before she thinks of playing private detective to any one ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... to the memory, like a saying of Talleyrand's. His umbrae, who have put but little of allaying Tiber in their cups, grow boisterous and abusive, and having insulted nearly everybody at the table by coarse personal banter, the party breaks up, and we are glad to get out with flushed cheeks and dizzy head into the cool air of an early summer night—all the more, that for the last half-hour young Piso at our elbow has been importuning us with whispered specimens of his very rickety elegiacs, and trying to settle ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... to own that his cutlets could not be relished, even by hungry men. They began to banter him about his "Olympian dish," and indulge in jokes at his expense; but all he cared about was to find out how it happened that the flesh of the guanaco, which was certainly good and eatable food, had turned out so badly in his hands. At last light broke ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... eye the bodily size of Rolf, and smitten with great wonder thereat, proceeded to inquire in jest who was that "Krage" whom Nature in her beauty had endowed with such towering stature? Meaning humorously to banter his uncommon tallness. For "Krage" in the Danish tongue means a tree-trunk, whose branches are pollarded, and whose summit is climbed in such wise that the foot uses the lopped timbers as supports, as if leaning on a ladder, and, gradually advancing to the higher parts, finds the shortest ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... continued, not a bit grieved at the knight's banter, "I even heard the King's fool remark that since the man was so good, the master need must be. And then and there he hazarded a shrewd guess that if this master were not the King, nor Sir Launcelot, then it ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... Throwing banter aside, as much as he could, Adrian spoke to Richard. "You want to reform this woman. Her manner is open—fair and free—the traditional characteristic. We won't stop to canvass how that particular honesty of deportment ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the great art of banter. It is a marvellous force; it kills sanctity, unveils sophistry, travesties wisdom, cuts through the finest shield, and turns the noblest impulses ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... cloaks and capes, and the men, following their example, took off their coats and sat in their shirt-sleeves. Whereupon ensued much banter of a not particularly edifying kind respecting the garments which each person would like to remove—which showed that the innuendo of French farce is not so unknown to the upright, honest Englishman as ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... in the same grave tone, which might have passed for banter, had Jack ever bantered. "I'll maintain and prove it. I don't see how he can be otherwise. It is as necessary for a man to be a gentleman before he can turn highwayman, as it is for a doctor to have his diploma, or an attorney his certificate. Some of the finest gentlemen of their ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bridal and in fair I 've braced me wi' pride, The bruse I hae won, and a kiss of the bride; And loud was the laughter, gay fellows among, When I utter'd my banter, or chorus'd my song. Dowie to dree are jesting and glee, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... passion got the better of courtesy. Moreover, as Paula had herself observed, they did not marry at the end of the piece, as in Shakespeare's other comedies. Somewhat calm in this assurance, he waited on while the other couples respectively indulged in their love-making, and banter, including Mrs. Camperton as the sprightly Rosaline. But he was doomed to be surprised out of his humour when the end of the act came on. In abridging the play for the convenience of representation, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... naive enough to renew his banter. She took her seat on the corner sofa, and looked straight into his face: "Do we really intend to remain friends, Daniel?" ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... "then we could get wood in abundance, and perhaps," he added, looking slyly over to the stove where some bread-soup was in preparation for their very temperate repast, "some better fare for dinner. But," he continued in a tone of humorous banter, which he frequently adopted, and pushing back his chair a few paces as he spoke, "while you superintend the household concerns, and give the necessary orders to the cook, I will withdraw into my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... trader had not been sure, by a certain good-humored twinkle in the large eye, that all this banter was sure, in the long run, to turn out a cash concern, he might have been somewhat out of patience; as it was, he laid down a greasy pocket-book on the cotton-bales, and began anxiously studying over certain papers in it, the young man standing by, the while, looking down on him with an air ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... you propose, Mrs. Marteen, to effect this little business deal without compromising either of us?" His tone was half banter, but her reply was to ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... hour a day to the King of Prussia to touch up a bit his works in prose and verse; I am his grammarian, not his chamberlain ... Never in any place in the world was there more freedom of speech touching the superstitions of men, and never were they treated with more banter and contempt. God is respected, but all they who have cajoled men in His name are ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... not imagine any such disagreeable thing!" said Antonius, in a sickly effort to make banter at the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... change in Philippa's face. The banter which had served her with so much effect, which she had relied upon as her defensive weapon, was suddenly useless. Lessingham had created an atmosphere around him, an atmosphere ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sunlight-flooded room, and, as one after another of the men glanced up from the table, they saw standing in the doorway a man of such malignant aspect that his look fell across the company like a menace. The swing of their banter slowed suddenly; it was as if the cold of a new-turned grave had struck across the June sunshine checking their roughshod fun. None of them had the hardihood to joke with a man that stood in the shadow ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... necessary pins, we hurriedly and sneakingly enter the drawing-room, and find all our guests already come together. Mother gives us an almost imperceptible glance of gentle reproach, but father is so occupied in bantering a strange miss—banter in which the gallant and the fatherly happily join to make that manner which is the envy and admiration of the neighborhood—that he seems unconscious of our entrance. An intuition, however, tells us that this is not the case, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... of her long checkered apron then needed close scrutiny and folding for some unknown purpose, and this duty diverted her thoughts from the subject, but she turned to Dolly, who enjoyed this banter in her own quiet little way, which seldom rippled into a loud laugh, for her own quiet little face was too pale and too pinched to invite such freebooters. "Come, come, Little Scout," she said. "Is she warm now, and were the rations ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... of it!" was Falconer's caution, serious beneath its air of banter, and on the other hand Billy perceived in the cautioner a latent uneasiness considered so irrational that he was doing his sensible best to ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... speech he poked rare fun at the dinner-debating members who were so ready to participate in the festivities of the society and so lax in attending the discussions. He not only did this with delicious banter and pointed sarcasm; but, with an audacious touch all his own, he coupled the toast with the name of one member present. This brought the ruffled gentleman up on to his legs, and, smarting under Mr. Chamberlain's ironical philippics, he ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... While he continued his banter she served him and attempted to serve Kate behind the curtains. By persistent, almost despairing pantomime, Kate dissuaded her from this. But at that moment the front door opened again, a brisk greeting was called out and ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... discussions in the little store wended their uneasy way along, a spark of humour was often injected into them by the delightful banter of a rollicking, good-natured Irishman, a big two-fisted fellow, generous- hearted and lovable, whom we affectionately called "Big Phil." I can see him now, standing like a great pyramid in the midst of the little group, ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... attention of the Secretary of State would be drawn to the desires of the district. Earl Grey was triumphantly elected, and when the news went home it caused some merriment. He was jokingly asked in the House of Lords when he would sail for Sydney. And for several weeks he underwent so much banter on the subject that his attention was fully aroused to the long-neglected question. He weighed the matter carefully, and, resolving to do the people of Port Phillip full justice, sent out word that he would at once prepare a Bill for the Imperial ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... deep-laid political scheme for centralizing the government and setting up a hereditary aristocracy. The press teemed with invective and ridicule, and the feeling thus expressed by the penny-a-liners was shared by able men accustomed to weigh their words. Franklin dealt with it in a spirit of banter, and John Adams in a spirit of abhorrence; while Samuel Adams pointed out the dangers inherent in the principle of hereditary transmission of honours, and in the admission of foreigners into a secret association possessed of political ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... capacity of any Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry of a splendour and fertility which neither Browning himself nor the great English poet who had identified his name with that of Juan, and whom Browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever surpassed. The poem inevitably challenged comparison with Byron's masterpiece. In dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit and passion, the English nineteenth century produced nothing more comparable to the Don Juan of Byron ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... loiterers in the lobby glanced curiously at the two young men. These strangers strode in laughing in a way of mutual banter, as if their sudden decision to see the show ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... play with the fears of others, he understood well enough the banter in Mr. Rogers's tone, and that he was being sauced in his own sauce. He read the menace in it too. But what ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that they won't forget in a hurry. So they have been well punished, and Tommy has been wired to to come home at once, so he has been punished. And Hilary's punishment here is to come. It will take the form of such endless banter and chaff from her brothers and sisters that it will be a long time before she thinks of playing private detective to any one ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... and of concentrated energy; but his real character was not fully comprehended until the Crimean war, although he was conspicuous in politics for forty years. His frank utterances, his off-hand manner, his ready banter, and his joyous eyes captivated everybody, and veiled his stern purposes. He was distrusted at St. Petersburg because of his alliance with Louis Napoleon, his hatred of the Bourbons, and his masking ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... suit each of them. Despard's face, naturally grave, assisted him toward maintaining the mock-serious tone which he chose to adopt; and Mrs. Thornton's peculiar style of face gave her the same advantage. It pleased each to express for the other an exaggerated sentiment of regard. They considered it banter and badinage. How far it was safe was another thing. But they had known one another years before, and were only resuming the ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... keen-faced and wise, mother and grandmother, at forty; and so on—such she might have lived and died, and been none the worse for her reclusion, had she not leaned more than half out of her window in the Vicolo one bright April morning of her sixteenth year, to exchange lively banter with a friend below, and been seen by Messer Alessandro del Dardo, who within the cuirass of Sub-Prefect of Padua nourished the heart of an approved Poet; been seen of him for the miracle of young beauty she really was. Chance sparks ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... give up preaching, and try no more. But Abe would say, "Why, devil, thaa 'rt vary much troubled abaat my praaching; if I'm such an old fool as thaa mak's aat, I canna do the' so much harm." But all the banter and strife he had with the devil did not conquer that arch-enemy; talking to him is mostly waste time and ill-spent breath; there is another way which a good man has of finding relief; he can go to God in prayer. ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... the matter from more than one point of view. At first Lorimer had tried to banter him out of the plan, insisting that the guardianship would be sufficient. There was something in his earnest desire that touched the heart of the man of wide experience. He wondered why he could ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... mind very much, Squaw-talk-far-off?" He ducked and peered into her face again, and again his face sobered. "What's the matter?" he asked, in an entirely different tone—which Miss Georgie, in spite of her mood, found less satisfying than his banter. ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... Sir Luke's banter was generally accepted with indifference, but on this occasion it provoked Lady Dunstable. She protested with vehemence that she had given Mrs. Meadows every chance, and that a young woman who was both trivial and conceited could not expect to get on in society. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... entrance of the gentlemen seemed to put a bridle on the tongues of the little party, for Dexie was not slow in perceiving that Maxwell was trying to quiz her, and it was very hard to withstand the good-humored banter of this young gentleman. She stood the teasing as long as she thought necessary, then her ready tongue made Maxwell confess that for once he had met his match, and the laughable occurrence of their ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... his intellectual side. When he was the scholar, the scientist, the philosopher, he demanded and received the strictest attention and consideration from his immediate coterie of friends. So long as he was merely le bon diable, the jovial clubman, it was safe to banter and even to contradict him; but when the conversation drifted into the higher realms of thought, it was tacitly understood that the privileges of friendship were revoked. At such moments it was as though ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... executive thoroughness. He knew how many pounds of cotton a certain man or woman was likely to pick within the working hours of a day, and he marked the clean and the trashy pickers; and the play of his two-colored temperament was seen in his jovial banter of the one and his harsh reprimand of the other. But to-day a hired man stood at the scales to see the cotton weighed. The Major walked abroad throughout the fields. As he drew near, the negroes hushed their songs and their swaggering talk. They bowed respectfully to him and ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... delightful to see Davies wincing when I described my first night at Flensburg, for I had my revenge at last, and did not spare him. He bore up gallantly under my jesting, but I knew very well by his manner that he had not forgiven me my banter ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... LYSAND. If you banter me, I am dumb. Nor did I know that there was any thing of eloquence in my chit-chat. If Lisardo had had my experience, we might then have witnessed some glittering exhibitions of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a day to the King of Prussia to touch up a bit his works in prose and verse; I am his grammarian, not his chamberlain ... Never in any place in the world was there more freedom of speech touching the superstitions of men, and never were they treated with more banter and contempt. God is respected, but all they who have cajoled men in His name are ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... said Superintendent Galloway, nodding his head at the innkeeper with a kind of ferocious banter. "You're really a first-class villain, upon my soul! But this precious story with which you've tried to bamboozle us is not complete. Would it be putting too much strain on your inventive faculties to ask you, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... While this disgusting banter was going on I observed a planter ride up to one of the brokers and whisper for some time in his ear. The planter was a bad but unmistakable likeness of my friend Moore, worked over, so to speak, with a loaded brush and heavily glazed with old ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... attempted to warn the Princess that if the man were not a maniac he was more dangerous, she asked him bluntly if her husband had constituted him her dragon, and thereafter in half contemptuous banter she gave him ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... Nobody but Mr Tigg, who, notwithstanding his extreme shabbiness, was still understood to be in some sort a lady's man, in right of his upper lip and his frogs, indicated a doubt of the justifiable nature of these measures; and he only ogled the three Miss Chuzzlewits with the least admixture of banter in his admiration, as though he would observe, 'You are positively down upon her to too great an extent, my sweet creatures, upon my ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... to this. God is great; and when a scandal is to end, brings some devoted man to take charge of it in hope, not in despair!"—But cannot he reform? asked many simple persons;—to whom our friend in grim banter would reply: "Reform a Popedom,—hardly. A wretched old kettle, ruined from top to bottom, and consisting mainly now of foul grime and rust: stop the holes of it, as your antecessors have been ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... gay banter, wondering, as many thoughtful people have wondered before her, at the light-hearted abandon of these other girls. "It must be fun to be like that," she reflected, "but I don't believe I should want to change places with any of them. They only see their own little piece of things, ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... accidental kindness touched him so much that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised to his active imagination and what it gave. But ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Potsdam regiment of giants, and called back to Halle the philosopher Wolf, whom his father had banished. Frederick was visited by Voltaire, who at a later day took up his abode for a time with him in Berlin. But the king was fond of banter, and the foibles of each of these companions were a target for the unsparing wit of the other; so that eventually they parted company with mutual disgust. Later they resumed their correspondence, and never wholly lost their intellectual sympathy with each other. As a soldier, Frederick had ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... them sat in at the meal, with a considerable clashing of cutlery on tin plates and cups. It was evident to Lambert that his presence exercised a restraint over their customary exchange of banter. In spite of the liberality of the cook, and the solicitation on part of his numerous hosts to "eat hearty," Lambert could not help the feeling that he was away off on the edge, and that his arrival had put a rein on the ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... of Greece, he only gave the substance of the article he had written for the Revue des Deux Mondes, as the paper was yet unpublished all the remarks were novel, and the anecdotes fresh and sparkling. The tone of light banter and raillery in which he described public life in Greece and Greek statesmen, might have lost some of its authority had any one remembered to count the hours the speaker had spent in Athens; and Nina was certainly indignant at ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... both her companions' not having the least conception that it could be otherwise. To tell them that she felt ashamed for herself and for them would be to betray her agitation, while to decline their offers to dress her would prolong their banter and insistence. She flushed, her beautiful eyes grew dim, red blotches came on her face, and it took on the unattractive martyrlike expression it so often wore, as she submitted herself to Mademoiselle Bourienne and Lise. Both these women quite sincerely tried to make her look pretty. She was so ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... that he did not wish to break. Often she mocked at him and laughed at him, and then he liked her all the better. No placid, submissive woman, shrinking before the dangers, would have pleased him. In her light laughter and her banter, even at his expense, he read a noble courage and a lofty soul, and in their singular isolation it was given to him to see her spirit, so strong and yet so rarely sweet in a manner that the circumstances of ordinary life could never have brought forth. And the faithful Suzanne, ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was exquisite. She was a plain woman; but there was no envy in her, and she took the keenest pleasure in Margaret's comeliness. It was almost with maternal pride that she watched each year add a new grace to that exceeding beauty. But her common sense was sound, and she took care by good-natured banter to temper the praises which extravagant admirers at the drawing-class lavished upon the handsome girl both for her looks and for her talent. She was proud to think that she would hand over to Arthur Burdon a woman whose character she had helped ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... for what he knows to be right, and ready to maintain it against all odds, especially of such enemies as banter or ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... words. He kept his promise, thus committing the first of that series of offences which, in the poet's vindictive memory, marked him down for elevation to the throne of Dulness which was rendered vacant by the deposition of King Tibbald."[16] There is a rumour that Gay, in revenge for Cibber's banter of "Three Hours After Marriage," personally chastised the actor-dramatist,[17] but there is nothing definitely known about this. Anyhow, Gay was so irritated by the failure of this play that he did not produce anything at a theatre during the next ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... in vain for some airy nothing with which to answer his nonsense. I never have had the gift of repartee. I can talk well enough about subjects that interest me when I am conversing with some one whom I know well, but the frothy persiflage, the light banter that forms the conversation's stock in trade of so many women, is an ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... ever-moving opinions of the masses. Palmerston was capable of insolence towards the weak, quick to the sense of honor, not heedful of right; LINCOLN rejected counsel given only as a matter of policy, and was not capable of being wilfully unjust. Palmerston, essentially superficial, delighted in banter, and knew how to divert grave opposition by playful levity; LINCOLN was a man of infinite jest on his lips with saddest earnestness at his heart. Palmerston was a fair representative of the aristocratic liberality of the day, choosing for his tribunal, not the conscience of humanity, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... certain appointments—hem!—for my part I was a little melancholy or so, thinking of my catastrophe,—that is, of my play's catastrophe; and so, said Sedley, winking at Rochester, 'Our friend is sorrowful.' 'Truly,' said I, seeing they were about to banter me,—for you know they were arch fellows,—'truly, little Sid' (we called Sedley Sid), 'you are greatly mistaken;'—you see, Morton, I was thus sharp upon him because when you go to court you will discover that it does not do to take without ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hurriedly and sneakingly enter the drawing-room, and find all our guests already come together. Mother gives us an almost imperceptible glance of gentle reproach, but father is so occupied in bantering a strange miss—banter in which the gallant and the fatherly happily join to make that manner which is the envy and admiration of the neighborhood—that he seems unconscious of our entrance. An intuition, however, tells us that this is not the case, but that he is making a note of it. This depresses us ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... produced, one might, I repeat, have been afraid lest Dickens should go through Italy as a kind of educated Sam Weller. Such prophecies would have been falsified by the event. The book as a whole is very free from banter or persiflage. Once and again the comic side of some situation strikes him, of course. Thus, after the ceremony of the Pope washing the feet of thirteen poor men, in memory of our Lord washing the feet of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... galvanise a new party by a series of novels, the romances cannot be works of literary art. If a young man wants only to advertise his own smartness, he will not produce a beautiful thing. And if a statesman out of office wishes to amuse himself by alternate banter and laudation of the very society which he has led and which looks to him as its inspiration, the result will be infinitely entertaining, but not a great work of art. Disraeli therefore with literary gifts of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... most delightful companions when off duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... present company of course excepted—many people, perhaps most people, are as infants. They have little sense of humor. They don't like jokes. Raillery in writing annoys and offends them. The coarseness apart, I think I have met very, very few women who liked the banter of Swift and Fielding. Their simple, tender natures revolt at laughter. Is the satyr always a wicked brute at heart, and are they rightly shocked at his grin, his leer, his horns, hoofs, and ears? Fi donc, le vilain monstre, with his shrieks, and his capering crooked legs! Let him ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... so glad you say No." He spoke passionately, and yet there was banter in his voice, or so it seemed to her. "It is because you fear to be told; it is because you had hoped that I did ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... you were, Mr. Morrissy." There was a dangerous flush on Ben's cheeks, but the smoke was so dense that Morrissy failed to observe it. The men laughed again, accepting Ben's retort as a piece of banter. Ben went on doggedly: "I have in my pocket a permit to tear down the shops. Bennington gave it to me to produce. Look at it, if you doubt my ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... along the road with a comfortable foot, a full stomach and in the midst of friends! Steve had never known greater joy than that moment held. They were a "happy-go-lucky" family he had fallen in with,—and for the first time in his life he was in the midst of the merry banter of children. The mountain folk of remote regions lack a sense of humour, and Steve had grown up entirely alone, the cabins of Hollow Hut being scattered, so he sat through the afternoon in a maze of delight. There were snickers ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... to talking of the scholars who had sat here and there, Miss Ludington began gently to banter Ida about this and that boyish sweetheart, and divers episodes ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... servants' hall were not wanting. It appeared, however, that an interview had taken place between Ben and Captain Delmar shortly after my making my appearance: what occurred did not transpire, but this is certain that, upon the marine's return to the kitchen, one of the grooms, who ventured to banter him, received such a sound thrashing from Ben that it put an end to all further joking. As Ben had taken up the affair so seriously, it was presumed that if there had been anticipation of the hymeneal rites he was himself the party who had been hasty; and that ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... performance of this comedy the following play was given: first appeared a boy in woman's clothes who represented Virtue, and another in the character of Fortune. They began to banter each other as to which was the mightier, whereupon Fame suddenly appeared, standing on a globe which rested on a float, upon which were the words, "Gloria Domus Borgiae." Fame, who also called himself Light, awarded Virtue the prize ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... the citadel could be had at any time for the asking, George began his sapping and mining operations with great vigor. He made Aun' Sheba sit down and give directions for supper, which he and his two colored men carried out. Mrs. Bodine was the only one who would jest with him, and he had a word of banter with her; and a cheery word for every one as ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... bad sort of fellow. He sometimes had really sensible things to say. He was something of a dandy with his Parisian working man's gift for banter, a regular gift of gab, and besides, ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... thick—so they will seem like packets. I may even write that famous journal and send it in instalments to you!" Then suddenly the banter died of her eyes and voice and she said half-sentimentally: "Dear old Jack! Most of every one I shall miss you. I hope things will go famously for ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... a distinguished passage in support of the Christian Revelation. After shewing, in decent but strong terms, the unfairness of the INDIRECT attempts of modern infidels to unsettle and perplex religious principles, and particularly the irony, banter, and sneer, of one whom he politely calls 'an eloquent historian', the archdeacon thus ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... St Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, have not quite equalled this. He found it had been made the subject of serious criticism and ludicrous banter. But his one object, as he tells 'serious criticks,' has been to delineate Johnson's character, and for this purpose he appeals from Philip drunk to Philip sober, and to the approbation of the discerning reader. Later on, he has laid the flattering unction to his heart, and has extracted ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... evidently thought this an exquisite piece of banter, for by the corner of his mouth I saw that ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the old plaza where their hotel was located. Their transit was an interrupted one, for these four cattlemen were among the best known in the Southwest. All along the route they scattered nods of recognition, friendly greetings, and genial banter. One of them—the man who had formerly been the hard-riding, quick-shooting sheriff of the county—met also scowls once or twice, to which he was entirely indifferent. Luck had no slavish respect for law, had indeed, if rumor were ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... to say, you think I have sense enough to love you," said Fanny, still in a tone of banter. "We part as friends, however, and if you insist on coming to call upon my sister, Mrs Barton, of course I cannot help it, only do not for a moment suppose that I give you ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... we were alone she was at a good deal of pains to flatter me; always cleverly, always with the appearance of a banter, still calling me Saxpence, but with such a turn that should rather uplift me in my own opinion. When Catriona returned, the design became if possible more obvious; and she showed off the girl's advantages like a horse-couper ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his laughing banter; on the instrument board the warning light was flashing imperatively. Above the bedlam of voices one stood out, and all other commands went silent before the ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... belted low, in heavy boots, leaning over an unharnessed waggon, fling each other smart volleys of banter, with broad grins showing ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... the men; and they all returned together to Holly Street, where a meal had been prepared in the front parlours, the landlady having generously placed them at the disposal of her lodgers for the occasion. There was a good deal of banter and side jokes were bandied about from one to another; which was galling to young Chetwynd, and made him devoutly thankful that none of his own companions and friends were present. When at last Bella ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... though I never really lost my confidence in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that he delighted to assume. Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me with exasperating banter; and, inheriting from some of my progenitors a vindictive temper, I once retaliated severely. We were in the sitting-room with my father and some others, while I was tortured. The chancery-suit was just then approaching its most critical point, and, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Douglas's usual sobriquet was "the little giant," and it fitted well—a man of stalwart proportions oddly "sawed off." His voice was vibrant and sonorous, his mien compelling. It was no great speech, a few sentences of compliment to the city and of good-natured banter of the political foes among whom he found himself; but it was ex pede Herculem, a leader red-blooded to the finger-tips. I treasure the memory of this brief touch into which I once came with Douglas ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... sought to entertain and instruct them in detail on any topic of the time; though it was plain that he courted inquiry and remark, which to a certain extent was necessary to the full and pleasant exercise of his faculties. But it was infinitely amusing to hear him banter an obstinate old lawyer on a point of law, catching at his arguments before he had half uttered them, and dissecting them with such wonderful dexterity that the listeners, shaking with laughter, saw, probably for the first time, that the severest logic and ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... the less practical sphere, you may read, if you please, where, with wonder and strange emotion, I read, in the heavenly records of marriages.' ... [It was dated about the time of my birth.] 'Your banter is not so agreeable as your tenderness.' ... 'You are incorrigible. It will take me many a long age to bring you to a due sense of my importance,' etc. 'Some of my friends are beside themselves with mirth, at my vain attempts at taming ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... litters, while the white-robed soldiers carried long rifles and in their sashes were pistols, and those keen carved knives called jambiyahs. At first our natives, believing that they were friendlies, went forward enthusiastically, determined to drive them back with banter, there not being room to pass, but very soon Omar ordered another halt, and turning towards us, cried in a loud ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... as the cloth was removed; but they were by this time become so fond of wine that they would frequently remind me of the health in the middle of dinner by calling out King George Earee no Brittannee; and would banter me if the glass was not filled to the brim. Nothing could exceed the mirth and jollity of these people when they ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... unflinching eye, the great lawyer trembled, as many a witness had trembled of old under his own cross-examination. But he tried to pass it off just at first with a little society banter. He bowed, and smiled, and pretended to look arch—look arch, indeed, with that ashen, white face of his!—as he ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... at her with an amused expression. Evidently they understood each other. As the banter continued, Harvey began to feel uncomfortable. He tried to listen to the orchestra, which was ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... and those of other artisans,—all and each of them are nothing else but science.' 'You are munificent indeed,' said Socrates; 'for when asked for one thing, you have given many.' I almost think," continued Harrington, "that, if Socrates were here, he would do what I should not presume to do,—banter you in a somewhat similar way. He would say, that, having asked what a miracle was, Mr. Fellowes told him that half a dozen things were miracles, but did not tell him what every miracle was; that is, never told him what made all miracles ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... the hotel did so for her sake, and she was willing to extend her father's trade. In fact, she helped to manage both businesses as cleverly as she managed the customers. Her charm was largely physical, but she used it with caution. One might indulge in banter, and Sadie had a ringing laugh that young men liked, but there were limits that few who knew her overstepped. One or two had done so, but had been rebuked in a way they wished to forget. Sadie ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... are men of the most diverse sorts but very much of a unit, and all bright, witty, and ready to cooperate. Indeed, having a system of fetching each other's hay and filling each other's canteens, they have a better squad organization than we. It has pleased me very much that our banter between the tents at Plattsburg has turned into the friendliest of feeling, so that we naturally seek each other out. We gave them a spread last night, and today are invited to another ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... on both sides; there will be a pitched battle in a few minutes. The donkey was enjoying it. I think he was asleep!" The day had been an unusually hard one, and the patient little schoolmistress was just then struggling with a distracted sense of unavailing effort. Arnold's grim banter had brought the tears, as blood follows a blow. He got down from his horse, looking wretched at what he had done. "I am a brute, I believe,—worse than any of the pack. You have so much patience with them,—please have a little with me. Trust me, I ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... her banter about the provincial festivals had stung him. The word "provincial" rankled. If it applied to him, to his talent! If he were merely provincial and destined to remain so because ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... people; while other qualities are required that are hardly to be looked for in one and the same capacity. The way to move great masses of men is to shew that you yourself are moved. In a private circle, a ready repartee, a shrewd cross-question, ridicule and banter, a caustic remark or an amusing anecdote, whatever sets off the individual to advantage, or gratifies the curiosity or piques the self-love of the hearers, keeps attention alive, and secures the triumph of the speaker—it is a personal contest, and depends on personal ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... a-laughing, and began to banter her. The gentleman who was sent to try the slipper looked earnestly at Cinderella, and, finding her very ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... lawn Valentina's ladies and a page beguiled the eventide in a game of bowls, their clumsiness at the unwonted pastime provoking the good-humoured banter of Peppe, who looked on, and their own still ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... could have e'er believed, unless in spite Lewis le Grand would turn rank Williamite? Thou that hast look'd so fierce and talk'd so big, In thine old age to dwindle to a Whig! Of Kings distress'd thou art a fine securer. Thou mak'st me swear, that am a known nonjuror. Were Job alive, and banter'd by such shufflers, He'd outrail Oates, and curse both thee and Boufflers For thee I've lost, if I can rightly scan 'em, Two livings, worth full eightscore pounds per annum, Bonae et legalis Angliae Monetae. But now I'm ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... what he was as a man and nothing more in that distinguished company which had gained its distinction by extinguishing Germans. Comradeship made all differences of opinion, birth and wealth only the excuse for banter in this variation of type from the tall architect with his charming manner to the matter-of-fact expert in diamonds and opals, from the big private of colonial regulars who had won his shoulder straps to the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the priests had gone home, and straight to court, to make a thousand complaints. The military governor who had deserted the colony did the same thing, adding, "There is no gold in the Indies of Antilla, and all the Admiral said about his discoveries was mere sham and banter." ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... French, German, and Spanish, besides I don't know how many Indian sign-languages." Now I was patting the groom on the back. I sat facing the ladies, so it was impossible to see the expression on his face. I kept up this banter till we arrived at the Department. I bade the ladies good day. I do not recollect when I enjoyed ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... riflemen met a party of Marblehead fishermen. The dress of the fishermen was as singular to the riflemen as that of the riflemen was to the fishermen, and they began to banter each other. Snow-balls soon began to fly back and forth, and finally hard blows were interchanged. A melee occurred, in which a thousand ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... drive away Little sweet maidens from the play, Or love to banter and fight so well, That's the thing I ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... what Fleeming would so sensitively feel - the death of a whole family of children. Yet it was gone upon like a holiday jaunt. I read in Colonel Fergusson's letter that his schoolmates bantered him when he began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the banter as he always did with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed me with the question: 'And now do you see any other jokes to make? Well, then,' said he, 'that's all right. I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we can be serious.' And then with a glowing heat of pleasure, he laid his plans ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... annotated in pencil in many places. I may quote one passage opposite which my father has written "good sneers"—but it should be remembered that he used the word "sneer" in rather a special sense, not as necessarily implying a feeling of bitterness in the critic, but rather in the sense of "banter." Speaking of the 'true believer,' ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... asked Calvin. He flicked hossy on the ear, but his tone was not the usual one of friendly banter. Hossy ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... drifted to other points, and I lay thinking of the skirmish that had played beneath the surface of their banter. Yes, the joke, as they put it, was on Steve. He had lost one point in the game to them. They were playing for names. He, being a chivalrous thief, was playing to hide names. They could only, among several ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... as they took their stand at the steps of the Piazzetta to receive the oncoming barges, for the "Calza" were the very darlings of their eyes, and never had they been more brilliant. With true Venetian comradery the crowd tossed them light banter on the names of their divisions, with pantomimic interpretation, in ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the sneer is supercilious; the taunt is defiant. The jeer and gibe are uttered; the gibe is bitter, and often sly or covert; the jeer is rude and open. A scoff may be in act or word, and is commonly directed against that which claims honor, reverence, or worship. Compare BANTER. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Despite his banter he was very savage and he flung her hands from him. She at once laid hold of the strap to open the window. He burst into a ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... which the lawyer threw into the playful banter of his tone was not lost on the financier. The mask of his cunning, dark visage was not slipped for a moment as he ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... grave about it, although it was only a piece of banter which she felt that Nola would appreciate. But Nola was not in an appreciative mood, for she was a full-blooded daughter of the baronial rule. She jerked her head like a vicious bronco and reined hurriedly away from Frances ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... though a fierce exultation surged within her. She had half expected this, half dreaded it, and now that it had burst upon her in such volcanic fashion she realized that she had not been entirely prepared. She sought refuge in banter, facing him, her ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and childlike gayety as a wise relief for overwrought brains or high-strung sensibilities, our fireside sparkled with brilliant repartees and scintillating mirth. It is [137] pleasantly remembered that, in such by-play, Dr. Dewey, while often satirical, and prone to good-tempered banter, was never cynical, and was intolerant of personal gossip or he intrusion of mean slander. And to close the chapter of boyhood's acquaintance, it is gratefully recalled how cordially sympathetic this earnest ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... . . "I wonder . . ." then she laughed forgivingly. "Come, let us cease this constant banter. We have been at it ever since we met, and it profits ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... of the mind, pursuing its own ends of discourse, and suited to its own notions; whereby it designs not to copy anything really existing, but to denominate and rank things as they come to agree with those archetypes or forms it has made. He that first brought the word SHAM, or WHEEDLE, or BANTER, in use, put together as he thought fit those ideas he made it stand for; and as it is with any new names of modes that are now brought into any language, so it was with the old ones when they were first made use of. Names, therefore, that stand for collections of ideas which the mind makes ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... Hitchcock's clear, mocking voice could be heard teasing her cousin Caspar on his performance that afternoon. The heavy young man, whose florid face was flushed with the champagne he had taken, made ineffective attempts to ward off the banter. Parker Hitchcock came to ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... at Phil more closely. She seemed preoccupied and her contributions to their banter were perfunctory and spiritless. When they were established in the living-room, Phil crouched on a stool by the fire. Concealment and dissimulation were so wholly foreign to her nature that it was with difficulty that she resisted an impulse ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... reproached and insulted by insolent pedants and ballad-making poets for employing foreigners and being a foreigner himself, I confess myself moved by it to remind our nation of their own original, thereby to let them see what a banter they put upon themselves, since—speaking of Englishmen ab origine—we are really all ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... silver have made the decent four-pronged fork cheaper than the two-pronged steel barbarism, what has followed? Why, this—that the universality of the diffusion has made it hopeless any longer to banter it. There is, therefore, this strict analogy between "the silver fork" reproach and "the bluestocking" reproach—that in both cases alike a recognition, gradually becoming universal, of the thing itself, as a social necessity, has put ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the scant measure of freedom in Piedmont, he could never be induced to go near his sovereign till Charles Emmanuel was staying at Florence as a proscript. Then the poet went to pay his respects to him, and was received with the good-humoured banter: 'Well, Signor Conte, here am I, a king, in the condition you would like to see ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... sir," said Peveril; "and if so, I think I may fairly ask you your purpose in thus bearing me company, and the meaning of all this rhapsody. If it be mere banter, I can endure it within proper limit; although it is uncivil on the part of a stranger. If you have any farther purpose, speak it out; I am not ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Toryism, from whom he certainly provoked some retaliation, is only paralleled in Blackwood. We have included the Shakespeare and the Moxon as attractively brief samples on the approved model of savage banter, and the Jane Eyre as perhaps the most flagrant example of bad taste to be found in these merciless pages. It was George Henry Lewis, by the way, who so much offended Charlotte Bronte by the greeting, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... described as a humorous companion!—and the programme of the past years had been all work and no play. As he sat in Mrs Trevor's drawing-room that first afternoon, he listened in a somewhat dazed fashion to the banter which went on between Jack and his sisters; but after some time had passed his face began to soften, the corners of his mouth twitched, and presently out flashed that delightful, whole-hearted smile, and Betty, meeting it, buried at once and for ever all lingering ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... named Wigg, scanning with attentive eye the bodily size of Rolf, and smitten with great wonder thereat, proceeded to inquire in jest who was that "Krage" whom Nature in her beauty had endowed with such towering stature? Meaning humorously to banter his uncommon tallness. For "Krage" in the Danish tongue means a tree-trunk, whose branches are pollarded, and whose summit is climbed in such wise that the foot uses the lopped timbers as supports, as if leaning on a ladder, and, gradually advancing to the higher ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... by your knowledge. I thought every schoolboy knew the cuckoo-flower!" cried Adelaide, trying to seem natural and not bitter in her banter, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... him, could also work at their several professions with equal results. He was glad that Oliver had been found worthy enough to be admitted to such a circle. He loved, too, to hear his son's voice and watch the impression his words made on the room. As the evening wore on, and he listened to his banter, or caught the point of the jests that Oliver parried and heard his merry laugh, he would slip his hand under the table and pat his boy's knee with loving taps of admiration, prouder of him than ever. His own pleasures so absorbed him that he continued to sit almost ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... wonderful collection of articles of art, antiquarianism, and vertu, Hazlitt has only good-natured banter. Of what a strange jumble of apocryphal treasures the painter believed himself the possessor! And he was without the doubts and anxieties of ordinary collectors. They strive to believe and to cast aside all suspicion. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... is this work of educating the electors to be accomplished? Not, I maintain, by furious speeches and rhetorical displays; not by bribery, baits and banter; but by patient, never-ceasing labour, by lectures on history and science, by individual instruction, is the great work to be accomplished upon which the security and stability of ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... tease and banter one another and oftentimes an outsider might have thought from their conversation that they had lost their tempers. Such, however, was never the case. They knew one another too well and all had too much sense for any such foolishness. In particular they all liked to tease and threaten Pop Sanders, ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... people took part jointly in many affairs, but Bob got Marjorie to himself as much as possible. The others chaffed them a good deal, but as the banter was all good-natured, it was ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... "A long banter then growed out of the 'boot money.' The Elder, asked 7 pounds 10s. Goodish swore he wouldn't give that for him and his hoss together; that if they were both put up to auction that blessed minute, they wouldn't bring it. The Elder hung on to it, as long ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... had had a glorious lark; somewhere beyond would be the piper with an appalling bill. They exaggerated the dangers, multiplied them; perhaps wisely. There would be no let-down in their vigilance until they reached haven. But this state of mind they covered with smiling masks, banter, bursts of laughter, and flashes ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... women— yet of whose notice the cleverest and most charming were always proud. Not because he was an earl—nobility was plentiful enough at Edinburg then—but because he was himself. It was a pleasure just to sit beside him, and to meet his pleasantness with cheerful chat, gay banter, ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... hands, engaged in a parting rally of good-humoured banter; the beaten man said his handsome word; the best man capped it with a compliment to him. They drink of different cups to-day. Both will drink of one cup in the day to come. But the day went too clearly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sympathize with the feller's being gone on the girl," he said to himself, undisturbed by Regina's frequent bursts of loud laughter at young Barclay's quiet but persistent banter, "but dammit, why make a conspicuous ass of himself? Why make the whole blessed house party, including his hostess, pay for his being turned down in favor of young Harry? Bad form, I call it. Any one would imagine that he was engaged to be married to Joan and therefore had some right to a ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... delightful essay on Huxley said that in the Huxley home there was more jest, joke and banter than in any other place in London. The air was surcharged with mirth, and puns, often very bad ones, were tossed back ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... way (tract societies not being then in vogue), and the descriptions were so pat, that each one who saw them was disposed to apply them in a joking way to any other who was known to practice bundling; and the result was, such a general storm of banter and ridicule that no girl had the courage to stand against it, and continue to admit ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... together for any length of time. Jack and Terence, like true friends, stuck close to Alick for the remainder of the day, doing their utmost to keep him from brooding over his unhappiness. His feelings, they knew, were too deep to allow them to banter him, as they would probably ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... be well supplied with funds, but purchased sparingly as became a miserly hermit. And so vicious was his tongue that few cared to converse with him, even the young hoodlums of the town hesitating to harass him with the banter usually accorded the other bizarre characters ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... other, in a hundred things outside of their work. They act like men and women, not like a painting machine; if they experience impulses and emotions they don't entirely stifle 'em. They have time and leisure to foregather, laugh, be silly, discuss, banter, flirt, make love, and cut up all the various harmless capers that humanity is heir to. That's what you mean, but you don't realise it. And you think, and they think, that my solemn and owlish self-suppression is drying me up, squeezing out of me the essence of that warm, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... ear, and smiled as he thought how easy it would be to stroll down the road to where the singing girl was, and accost her pleasantly: "So he's in Holland, is he? That's the queer and foolish place for him to be, and I here!" There would be banter, quick and smart as a whip, a scuffle, a clumsily placed kiss, laughter, another scuffle, and a kiss that found its mark somehow, then a saunter together down the scented loaning while the June moon rode ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
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