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More "Buffoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thickness, Henry Marten was imprisoned. He was one of the court that tried King Charles, and his signature is upon the king's death-warrant. He was a spendthrift, and afterwards had a quarrel with Cromwell, who denounced him as an unbeliever, and even as a buffoon. When Charles II. made the proclamation of amnesty, Marten surrendered, but he was tried and condemned to death. He plead that he came in under the proffer of mercy, and the sentence was commuted to a life ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... relish with which men enjoyed, in the Middle Ages, silly, teazing or puzzling answers; the questioner remaining at the end rolled up in the repartees, gasping as a fly caught in a spider's web. The Court fool or buffoon had for his principal merit his clever knack of returning witty or confusing answers; the best of them were preserved; itinerant minstrels remembered and repeated them; clerks turned them into Latin, and gave them place in their collections of exempla. They afforded amusement for a king, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... a writer of drama. Many are the persons called Namboku. The three preceding generations were actors who played in buffoon parts. In the fourth generation for the first time was taken up the literary work of play-writing. The Namboku in the fourth generation, Yo[u]myo[u] Genzo[u], later known as Inosuke, was born at Motohamacho[u]. The father ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... indeed odious and despicable folly, to be cast out with loathing, to be trodden under foot with contempt. If a man offends in this sort, to please himself, 'tis scurvy malignity; if to delight others, 'tis base servility and flattery: upon the first score he is a buffoon to himself; upon the last, a fool to others. And well in common speech are such practisers so termed, the grounds of that practice being so vain, and the effect so unhappy. The heart of fools, saith the wise man, is in the house ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... nature, smartness, and animal spirits; hence arose a vivacity and fluency that were often amusing, and passed for very clever. Reserve she had none; would talk about strangers, or friends, herself, her mother, her God, and the last buffoon-singer, in a breath. At a hint from Rosa, she told her who the lady in the pink dress was, and the lady in the violet velvet, and so on; for each lady was defined by her dress, and, more or less, quizzed by this show-woman, not exactly out of malice, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... he repeated, with glistening eyes, "you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your zany, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... an Answer to, etc., 1672; An Answer to two Letters of T.B., etc., 1673. The occasional references to it in the theological literature of these times are indeed innumerable. Many affected to treat him as a mere buffoon—the concoctor, as one bitterly put it, of 'a pretty fardle of tales bundled together, and they have had the hap to fall into such hands as had rather lose a friend, not to say their country, than a jest.' Anthony Wood, writing at the time of its ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... curried favour with Nero. Polyclitus was sent to inquire into Suetonius Paulinus' administration of Britain after the revolt of Boadicea in A.D. 61. Vatinius was a deformed cobbler from Beneventum who became a sort of court buffoon, and acquired great wealth and ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... friends among the reformers, chief among whom was Calvin. His intimacy with Calvin led the more radical reformers to be suspicious of him, and not without reason. Walter Besant tells us that, "One hears he is a buffoon—he is always mocking and always laughing. That is perfectly true. He laughs at the pretensions of pope, cardinal, bishop, and priest; he laughs at monkery and monks; he mocks at the perpetual iteration of litanies; he laughs at the ignorance and superstition ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... to history and but yesterday Sir Henry Irving stood alone—the unique representative in England of the great tragic art.... In conveying irony, the English actor is in his element; in comic parts, he is simply grotesque. The buffoon may occasionally be found upon the English stage—the brilliant comedian never. In tragic parts he easily assumes an exaggerated gravity and solemnity; in sentimental roles ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... wiseacres took our royal buffoon too seriously. Stylistically he was translated to the skies. [Sidenote: Cicero] Cicero[5] imputes to him "iocandi genus, ... elegans, urbanum, ingeniosum, facetum." [Sidenote: Aelius Stilo] Quintilian[6] quotes: "Licet ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... place. To whom is he to apply? Not to the great man; for to him he hath no access. He therefore applies to A, who is the creature of B, who is the tool of C, who is the flatterer of D, who is the catamite of E, who is the pimp of F, who is the bully of G, who is the buffoon of I, who is the husband of K, who is the whore of L, who is the bastard of M, who is the instrument of the great man. Thus the smile descending regularly from the great man to A, is discounted back again, and at last paid by the ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... not in my nature to derive consolation from such scenes; from theatres, whose buffoon laughter and discordant mirth awakened distempered sympathy, or where fictitious tears and wailings mocked the heart-felt grief within; from festival or crowded meeting, where hilarity sprung from the worst feelings of our nature, or such enthralment of the better ones, as impressed ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Horaces or Andromaque on the bills, and a crowd at the door, to commit ourselves, a few paces farther, to the friendly arms of a stall at the Palais Royal, and the mirth-inspiring influence of Tousez and Levassor, the most comical buffoon and admirable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... his alb and chasuble, dispensing of the blessings of the Pope; the judge, in his wig and bombazine, endeavouring to reconcile divine justice with the law's mundane majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the bride and bridegroom at the altar or before the mayor putting on their already heavy-ruffled garments the sacred ruffle of law ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... along the marble walk which led to the rear. Up the winding steps to the front entrance, where swung the marvelous bronze doors which had stirred the imaginations of two continents, streamed the favored of the fashionable world. Among them Carmen saw many whom she recognized. The buffoon, Larry Beers, was there, swinging jauntily along with the bejeweled wife of Samson, the multimillionaire packer. Kane and his wife, and Weston followed. Outside the gates there was incessant chugging of automobiles, mingled with the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... To Count Gregory Erdey she extended a smiling salutation from afar, which he requited by saluting her with his hat in one hand and his wig in another, which provoked a roar of Homeric laughter from the assembled guests. The young buffoon had had his head clean shaved in order that his hair might grow all the stronger, so that his bald pate quite scared the weak-nerved members of the company. The young housewife curtsied low in humble ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals and admirals, doctors and commissariat officers, and they submit to be patronised by him. Half-priest, half-buffoon, something of a Friar Tuck and something of a Louis XV. abbe, he is a sort of privileged person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in love with a curate and a cavalry ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man. Indiscriminate familiarity either offends your superiors, or else dubbs you their dependent and led captain. It gives your inferiors just, but troublesome and improper claims of equality. A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit. Whoever is admitted or sought for, in company, upon any other account than that of his merit and manners, is never respected there, but only made use of. We will have such-a-one, for he sings prettily; we will invite such-a-one to a ball, for he ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... vigorous kick, which the latter is obliged to receive with equanimity, much to the amusement of the spectators. This byplay is also a reminiscence of the habits of the early comediens italiens, who indulged to excess in lazzi, which originally meant, not witticisms, but tricks more or less buffoon in their nature, such as circus clowns still indulge in. We know that Marivaux objected to any liberty being taken with the roles by the actors. It may well be questioned whether the above-mentioned gesture would have met his approval. In a letter written to Sarcey (published in Quarante ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... Another of Michelangelo's buffoon friends was a Florentine celebrity, Piloto, the goldsmith. We know that he took this man with him when he went to Venice in 1530; but Vasari tells no characteristic stories concerning their friendship. It may be remarked that Il Lasca describes Piloto as a "most entertaining ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... of the six is the real man?—that's the question that torments me. One of them is a hero, another a buffoon, another a humbug, another perhaps a bit of a blackguard. (He pauses and looks furtively at Louka, as he adds with deep bitterness) And one, at least, is a coward—jealous, like all cowards. (He goes ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... be the climax: that I should show my long beard and white hairs amid that throng of women and lunatics; and clap and yell in unseemly rapture over the vile contortions of an abandoned buffoon. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... its head and extended its arms, as if conscious of the approaching beatitude, then, after having received the benediction and been encircled by another angel with a crown of glory, it gradually disappeared behind the clouds. At this instant a buffoon, who all the time had been playing his antics below, burst into an extravagant fit of joy; at one moment clapping his hands most violently, at the next stretching himself out as if dead. Finally, he ran up to the feet ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... inquiry, call it by what name you please. The science of common sense is all-sufficient. The seemingly intelligent individual who can only find material for ribaldry in this connection is a more serious buffoon than he imagines. It is apparent that our methods are wrong. Any constructive effort to correct them is commendable. When it is stated that 20 per cent. of the American women are unable to bear children, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... tragedian, buffoon—all in one. There was no shade of human emotion which he did not seem capable ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... And like the Tempter, ever in disguise. See him, with aspect grave and gentle tread, By slow degrees approach the sickly bed; Then at his Club behold him alter'd soon— The solemn doctor turns a low Buffoon, And he, who lately in a learned freak Poach'd every Lexicon and publish'd Greek, Still madly emulous of vulgar praise, From Punch's ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... direction for many successive generations and in a considerable number of individuals at the same time. We did not know that the theory of evolution was one that had been quietly but steadily gaining ground during the last hundred years. Buffon we knew by name, but he sounded too like "buffoon" for any good to come from him. We had heard also of Lamarck, and held him to be a kind of French Lord Monboddo; but we knew nothing of his doctrine save through the caricatures promulgated by his opponents, or the misrepresentations of those who had another kind of interest in disparaging ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... would you had him closely watched. For he is a general disliker of us and of our doings; he is gathering together an enormous treasure, and he makes an open jest of our literary pursuits. You, for instance, he calls a philosophizing old woman, and me a dissolute buffoon and scamp. Consider what you would have done. For my part, I bear the fellow no ill will; but again, I say, take care that he does not do a mischief to yourself, or ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... thought that defeat and submission were, at least, robbed of their shame, when such was the character of the conqueror; and the claim once allowed was no longer questioned. Very different was the case, when the emperor was a fidler, or a buffoon, the senators puppets, and the pro- consuls themselves ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... human life, none has suffered so much in this kind as love; under which revered name, a brutal desire called lust is frequently concealed and admitted; though they differ as much as a matron from a prostitute, or a companion from a buffoon. Philander[463] the other day was bewailing this misfortune with much indignation, and upbraided me for having some time since quoted those excellent ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Remusat," I., 108, one of his confessions to Talleyrand: he crudely points out in himself the distance between natural instinct and studied courage.—Here and elsewhere, we obtain a glimpse of the actor and even of the Italian buffoon; M. de Pradt called him "Jupiter Scapin." Read his reflections before M. de Pradt, on his return from Russia, in which he appears in the light of a comedian who, having played badly and failed in his part, retires behind the scenes, runs down the piece, and criticize ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of laughter proceeding from their corner of the house announced that business was over, and that chaff and fun, so dear to the heart of every Kanowit, was being carried on with great gusto. As we arrived and stood by the group, one of their number (evidently a privileged buffoon) begged to be allowed to speak to the Resident. "You remember that gun, Resident," said he, "you gave me?" (This was an old muzzle-loader for which Mr. H. had had no further use.) "Oh yes," was the reply; "what luck have you had with it?" "Oh, wonderful," said the Kanowit, ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... fully convinced of his ugliness; he used to go about in companies, and take every opportunity of inveighing against himself; he made verses and epigrams against himself; he talked about "that dwarf, Poinsinet;" "that buffoon, Poinsinet;" "that conceited, hump-backed Poinsinet;" and he would spend hours before the glass, abusing his own face as he saw it reflected there, and vowing that he grew handsomer at every fresh epithet ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "I dare say it is very funny, and anybody can laugh like a buffoon about such an arrangement; but how are they going to be safe on board a vessel whose officers cannot keep her ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... was puzzled, as if this laughter disclosed something that he had never suspected in her. But then Cassandra's face caught his eye, gazing with astonishment at the buffoon, not laughing, too deeply intent and surprised to laugh at what she saw, and for some moments he watched her as ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... not always rightly guide and bear with her weakness; was no prop to the "child," and believes himself absolved by this severe castigation. Qu'est-ce qu'il me chante? Has the letter undergone transformation in the Christian climate of Reinfeld, or did it leave the hand of this once shallow buffoon in its present form? He asserts, moreover, that he lives in a never dreamed of happiness with his present wife, whose acquaintance he made a week before the engagement, and whom he married six weeks after the same event: a happiness ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... instance, Prof. Scarborough has no right to labor in philology; Professor Kelly Miller in mathematics; Professor Du Bois, in history; Dr. Bowen, in theology; Professor Turner, in science; nor Mr. Tanner in art. There is no repugnance to the Negro buffoon, and the Negro scullion; but so soon as the Negro stands forth as an intellectual being, this toad of American prejudice, as at the touch of Ithuriel's ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... of the King's Blood against the English Parricides.' To which is added A Public Testimony of Alexander Morus, Churchman, and Professor of Sacred Literature, in reply to the Calumnies of John Milton, Buffoon. Printed at the Hague by Adrian Ulac, 1654.") The reprint of Milton's Defensio Secunda fills 128 pages of the volume; More's appended Fides Publica, or Public Testimony, in reply, is in larger type and fills 129 pages separately numbered. Morus, after ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... thalers for this, but in our country good people punch your head for it. No, my boy, to steal is abominable! That's an old trick, we'll have to give it up! But, you see, hunger isn't a kind old aunty, and you have to do something! I began to go about the town as a buffoon, to get money, a kopek at a time, to make a fool of myself, to tell funny stories, and play all sorts of tricks. Often you shiver from early morn till night in the town streets; you hide somewhere behind the corner away from people, and wait for merchants. ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... what thou shouldst be; prithee, Major, leave off being an old Buffoon, that is, a Lover turn'd ridiculous by Age, consider thy self a mere rouling Tun of Nantz,—a walking Chimney, ever smoaking with nasty Mundungus, and then thou hast a Countenance like ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... Domremy, In thine innocence secure, Heed not what men say of thee, The buffoon and his jest impure! Nor care if thy name, young martyr, Be the star of thy country's story:— Mid the white-robed host of the heavens ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... they had made no alterations in the original rude form of this poem, and as Thespis was the first that made any improvement in it, he was generally esteemed its inventor. Before him, tragedy was no more than a jumble of buffoon tales in the comic style, intermixed with the singing of a chorus in praise of Bacchus; for it is to the feasts of that god, celebrated at the time of the vintage, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... gloomy regions of Eblis, Beckford will not wholly repress his sense of the ridiculous. Carathis, unawed by the effulgence of his infernal majesty, behaves like a buffoon, shouting at the Dives and actually attempting to thrust a Soliman from his throne, before she is finally whirled away with her heart aflame. The calm politeness with which the dastardly Barkiaroukh consents to a blood-curdling murder, the sardonic dialogue ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the curious spectators in the church at Ars was a highly educated freethinker, a mocker at religion, of the Voltaire stamp. To please his wife he had accompanied her to Ars, in order, as he expressed it, to have a look at "the old buffoon." With a scornful air he surveyed the crowd praying devoutly in the little church. Suddenly the cure stepped out of the confessional, advanced towards the new arrival, and, with an imposing movement of the hand, requested him ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... Sulimani, a big, one-eyed Monumwezi, who had a really keen wit coupled with an earnest, solemn manner. This man was no buffoon, however; and he was a good porter, always at or near the head of the procession. In the great jungle south of Kenia we came upon Cuninghame. When the head of our safari reached the spot Sulimani left the ranks and, his load still aloft danced solemnly in front of Cuninghame, ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... favourite method of producing laughter among savages as well as civilised peoples. Why do we laugh when a man on the stage searches everywhere for his hat, which is all the time on his head? Why do we laugh when a pompous gentleman slips on a piece of orange-peel and falls to the ground, or when one buffoon unexpectedly hits another on the head, and, before he has time to recover, with equal unexpectedness hooks his legs with a stick and brings him heavily to the ground? Why did we laugh at the adventures of Mr. Penley in "Charley's Aunt"? In all ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... or buffoon-bird, is never found north of 46 deg. N. latitude in the summer. This bird pours forth all sorts of notes in a short space of time, without any apparent order. The thrush, the wren, the jay, and the robin are imitated in as short a time as it takes ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Oh! a private buffoon is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse; Yet though people forgive ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... most plainly shows the condition of social life which produced this class of tales, is the "Life of Estevanillo Gonzalez," first printed in 1646. It is the autobiography of a buffoon who was long in the service of Piccolomini, the great general of the Thirty Years' War. The brilliant success of these works at home and abroad subsequently produced the Gil Blas of Le Sage, an imitation more brilliant than any of the originals ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be intimated to him that if he did the author of Rasselas would thrash him in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 'Did not Foote,' asked Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, sir?' and our great moralist replied, 'Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.' When he denounced Macpherson for his ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... these the Mahdi threw his arms and legs about like a buffoon or raised his eyes in rapture, repeating "Lo! It is he!" "Lo! It is he!" and the sun began to decline towards the west, when he rose and left for his home. The children now could be convinced with what reverence the dervishes surrounded their prophet, for crowds eagerly followed ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... this matter the man distinguishes himself from the beast, seeing that no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of great understanding ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... conduct of the war, predicated upon a private letter of General Scott, the possession of which he did not satisfactorily account for. The Tribune, referring to his campaign as "a rhetorical spree," called him a "buffoon," a "political harlequin," a "repeater of mouldy jokes,"[852] and in bitter terms denounced his "low comedy performance at Tammany," his "double-shuffle dancing at Mozart Hall," his possession of a letter "by dishonourable means for a dishonourable purpose," and his wide-sweeping ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... wore big buttons. Later, he wore a suit of bedtick, with white and blue checks, the coarse mattress cloth of the period. Hence his name. The word that meant straw was afterward used for mattress which was stuffed with straw and then for the buffoon, who wore the mattress cloth suit. In France the Paillasse, as I have said, was the same as Pagliaccio. Sometimes he wore a red checked suit, but the genuine one was known by the colors, white and blue. He wore ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... scoffing at us—as they say sometimes that the Spaniards are chickens; again, that they are sibabuyes; [21] and again, that they will come to set fire to us all, and kill us. The Moro is a great rascal and buffoon. I trust in God that in a little while He will be ready for our thanksgivings [for the defeat of the Moros]. Will your Reverence urge His servants to aid us with their sacrifices and prayers. Those, I believe, it will be that must give us ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... people,—artists, politicians, poets,—which the metal of his own mind would never have found by reason of its own gravitating power. He courted notoriety in a way that would have made him, if a poorer man, the toadying Boswell of some other Johnson giant, and, if very poor, the welcome buffoon of some gossiping journal, who would never weary of contortions, and who would brutify himself at the death, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... Samuel Joseph May, and Frederick Douglass. They took strong hold upon me and gave me a higher idea of a man's best work in life. That was the bloom period of the old popular lecture. It was the time when lectures were expected to build character and increase knowledge; the sensation and buffoon business which destroyed the system had not yet come in. I feel to this hour the good influence of lectures then heard, in the old City Hall at Syracuse, from such men as President Mark Hopkins, Bishop ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... one of these an elderly, pinched little man who looked almost half-witted, was monotonously scraping a battered fiddle, for two solemn couples to dance round and round, always on the same axis. But the other "dancing salon" was more lively. There a man dressed like a buffoon, with a tall hat, a lobster claw for a nose, a uniform with big red flannel epaulettes and pasteboard buttons covered with gold paper, was pretending to conduct the band. And what a band ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body; those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... poet, priest, and buffoon, was born about the year 1460, and educated at what he calls "Alma parens, O Cantabrigensis." Tutor to Prince Henry, afterward Henry VIII., he could boast, "The honour of England I lernyd to spelle." That he was highly esteemed in his day we gather from the eulogium of Erasmus, then for ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... kind little man, already quoted, another so-called victim of the bottle. But Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt masters and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one night overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade. It was a treat to see him manage this: the various jesters withered under his gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... address them in Greek, but his mistakes in the language were received with peals of laughter from the thoughtless mob. Unable to obtain a hearing, much less an answer, Postumius was leaving the theatre, when a drunken buffoon rushed up to him and sullied his white robe in the most disgusting manner. The whole theatre rang with shouts of laughter and clapping of hands, which became louder and louder when Postumius held up his sullied robe and showed it to the people. "Laugh on now," he cried, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... nearly all simple folks, had a desire to laugh, even when they were worn out with fatigue, which made a pretext of the slightest thing, and notably of danger. One of them, called Tailleur, a buffoon with the airs of an executioner's assistant, would call out at the first explosions of ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural that Hamlet,—a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation,—should ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... As you may see, And in your place Away I'd flee; But don't blame me— I'm sorry to be Of your pleasure a diminutioner. They'll vow their pact Extremely soon, In point of fact This afternoon. Her honeymoon With that buffoon At seven commences, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Because Taste (GOUT, inclination) sets no limits to its recompenses. The King of Prussia overloads men of talent with his benefits for precisely the reasons which induce a little German Prince to overload with benefits a buffoon or a dwarf." [—OEuvres de Voltaire,—xxvii. 220 n.] Could there be a phenomenon more indisputably of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... has been in nowise sacrificed to mere ease of perusal, the general reader will find opened up for him a new view of Chaucer and his works. Before a perusal of these hundred pages, will melt away for ever the lingering tradition or prejudice that Chaucer was only, or characteristically, a coarse buffoon, who pandered to a base and licentious appetite by painting and exaggerating the lowest vices of his time. In these selections — made without a thought of taking only what is to the poet's credit from a wide range ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... check them over. To the joyful surprise of the visitors, there among them was little Eva—supposed to be eaten, and she even retained her right hand. Thus another newspaper libel upon the poor old black bear—the buffoon of the forest—was shown to be devoid of truth; yet that story was published in the Toronto papers, and, no doubt, was copied all over the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... laws framed by himself. Aristippus and Epicurus were in the highest esteem here as the most polite, benevolent, and convivial of men. Even AEsop the Phrygian was here, whom they made use of by way of buffoon. Diogenes of Sinope had so wonderfully changed his manners in this place, that he married Lais the harlot, danced and sang, got drunk, and played a thousand freaks. Not one Stoic did I see amongst them; they, it seems, were not yet got up to the top of the high hill {124a} of virtue; and ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... All gentlemen, or, as it is expressed here, noblesse, have been recalled from the army, and replaced by officers chosen by the soldiers themselves, [Under the rank of field-officers.] whose affections are often conciliated by qualities not essentially military, though sometimes professional. A buffoon, or a pot-companion, is, of course, often more popular than a disciplinarian; and the brightest talents lose their influence when put in competition with a head that can bear a ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... regulation, the Jester is always a Brahman, and therefore of a caste superior to the king himself; yet his business is to excite mirth by being ridiculous in person, age, and attire. He is sometimes represented as grey-haired, hump-backed, lame, and ugly. In fact, he is a species of buffoon, who is allowed full liberty of speech, being himself a universal butt. His attempts at wit, which are rarely very successful, and his allusions to the pleasures of the table, of which he is a confessed votary, are absurdly contrasted with the sententious solemnity of the despairing ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... were out and strict silence was observed. Each man had, therefore, time to commune with the spirits of those nine thousand miles away. It was not a time for the buffoon; they were faced with all the dread ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... first place, have seldom seen a man degraded but by his vices. Unaccustomed to many of the diversions of the world, they have seldom, if ever, seen him in the low condition of a hired buffoon or mimic. Men, who consent to let others degrade themselves for their sport, become degraded in their turn. And this degradation increases with the frequency of the spectacle. Persons in such habits are apt to lose sight of the dignity of mankind, and to consider them as made for administration ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... much internal satisfaction at the hut, Wolsey bade Patch dismount, and ascertain whether Mabel was within. The buffoon obeyed, tried the door, and finding it fastened, knocked, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... She is a good traveler. My servant will secure horses for you and meet you just before sunrise, near the gate. Maddalena will come there with her, and you must not ride so fast as to arouse curiosity. I have to play the buffoon at a banquet to-night, and there is but little ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... came to meet us with several of his head men. He was an extraordinary-looking man, about fifty-eight or sixty years of age; but, far from possessing the dignity usually belonging to a grey head, he acted the buffoon for our amusement, and might have been ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... pleasure. Deputies were accordingly sent immediately, for whose return the bulk of the members stayed in the Great Chamber. I was informed that this was one trick among others concerted to ruin me, and, telling the Duc d'Orleans of it, he said that if the old buffoon, the Keeper of the Seals, was concerned in such a complication of folly and knavery, he deserved to be hanged by the side of Mazarin. But the sequel showed that I was not ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved.—But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts and the effects of publick resentment, but has been caressed and patronised by persons of great ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why should he pick me for a bad influence...? Now, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Voltaire with Dennis and Rymer. 'Dennis and Rymer think Shakespeare's Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire censures his kings as not completely royal. Dennis is offended that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire, perhaps, thinks decency violated when the Danish usurper is represented as a drunkard. But Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident.... His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. He knew that Rome, like every other ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... naturally enough regard the personality of Punch with a good deal more than ordinary loyal sentiment and esprit de corps. It is interesting to observe the different views the artists have severally taken of it, for most of them in turn have attempted his portrayal. Brine regarded him as a mere buffoon, devoid of either dignity or breeding; Crowquill, as a grinning, drum-beating Showman; Doyle, Thackeray, and others adhered to the idea of the Merry, but certainly not uproarious, Hunchback; Sir John Tenniel ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... idea which these repeated and exhausted words throw into relief. Rhetoric is content to borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same phrase; and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some modem writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying his ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... countenance and antics that would have eclipsed Liston in his best days, and as supple in the movements of his joints as any clown on the stage. He imitated every movement we made, and burlesqued them to a very high degree, causing great laughter to his companions and us. He seems to be the buffoon of the tribe. The other natives delighted in making sport of him, by ridiculing the shortness of his stature and laughing at him behind ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... to an attack to which they will assuredly be found unequal. It is not altogether owing to their wisdom that this has not already taken place. For twenty years they were chained to the car of a profligate buffoon, who dragged them through every species of ignominy to the verge of rebellion; and their hall is even yet disgraced with the statue of a worthless negro-monger, in the act of insulting their sovereign with a speech of which (factious and brutal as ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... as much as the other boasts, and plays the Knave as much as the other does the Fool. For the Reader's Satisfaction, here follows a Translation of the first Act of the Miles Gloriosus, which begins between that Blockhead and his Buffoon. ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... would say, "Well, Madame, is there anything new to-day? Citizen, what say they of Bonaparte? Your shop appears to be well supplied. You surely have a great deal of custom. What do people say of that buffoon; Bonaparte?" He was made quite happy one day when we were obliged to retire hastily from a shop to avoid the attacks drawn upon us by the irreverent tone in which Bonaparte spoke of the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Lady Wood, outside the village. In the Ascensiontide sports the Earl wears a grotesque costume: a mask, and a smock padded with straw, and round his neck a chain of biscuits. He has with him a hobby-horse and buffoon covered with fantastic trappings, and carrying a small article called a "mapper" (which is conjectured to be a misreading for "snapper"), and representing the teeth and jaws of a horse. The Earl has also a donkey, decorated ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... all that's good, I'm mad, stark raving mad, To have a Woman young, rich, beautiful, Just on the point of yielding to my Love, Snatcht from my Arms by such a Beast as this; An old ridiculous Buffoon, past Pleasure, Past Love, or any thing that tends that way; Ill-favour'd, ill-bred, and ill-qualify'd, With more Diseases than a Horse past Service; And only blest with Fortune and my Julia; For him, I say, this Miser, to obtain her, After my tedious nights and days of Love, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... the inanimate face of the Emperor, and brought to Europe by Dr. Antommarchi, had been moulded in bronze and sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe, and had then inspired surprise and mistrust. People suspected the Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and famished, of having tried to make fun of people. Disciples of Dr. Gall, whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious. They did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the forehead, examined in accordance with the master's theories, presented nothing remarkable ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... to confession! He a heretic? He was a chatterbox, a boastful coward, nothing more! But the day of reckoning was at hand, and soon there would be nothing left of the great philosopher but a quill-driving buffoon. ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... changed considerably, but the process is easy to follow. From meaning simply ancient it acquired the sense of quaint or odd, and was applied to grotesque[102] work in art or to a fantastic disguise. Then it came to mean buffoon, in which sense Shakespeare applies it ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... I suppose you will wander from house to house, like that wretched buffoon Philippus (Xenophon; Convivium.), and beg everybody who has asked a supper-party to be so kind as to feed you and laugh at you; or you will turn sycophant; you will get a bunch of grapes, or a pair of shoes, now and then, by frightening some rich ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Pantaloon came therefore to signify (1) a Venetian, (2) a garment worn by Venetians and consisting of breeches and stockings in one. The second sense is preserved, substantially, in our term pantaloons. The first sense led to the use of the word (in the mouths of the Venetians' enemies) for "buffoon" and then (in early Italian comedy) for "a lean and foolish old man." It is this stock figure of the stage that Shakespeare evokes. In line 22 hose means the covering for a man's body from his waist ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... gaped at her. Underground politician that he was, he knew that Mirabelle had utterly destroyed the half of his ambition. She had made him a laughing-stock, a buffoon, a political joke. To think that his name was connected with a crusade against short-skirts and dancing—Ugh! Not even the average run of church-goers would swallow it. "Mayor!" he thought bitterly. "President of Council! I couldn't get elected ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... called absolute, and most elegant and various poems. Lucian, who was emulous of this Menippus, seems to have imitated both his manners and his style in many of his dialogues, where Menippus himself is often introduced as a speaker in them and as a perpetual buffoon; particularly his character is expressed in the beginning of that dialogue which is called [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]. But Varro in imitating him avoids his impudence and filthiness, and only expresses his ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep, underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: "I never wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely responsible—to ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... clear conscience, affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness.' Though—he says—he cannot wholly escape 'from some the imputation of sharpness,' he does not feel guilty of having offered insult to anyone, 'except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon.' But—'I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order of state I have provoked? ... What public person? Whether I have not, in all these, preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? ... Where have ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... become unlike themselves, by losing that peculiar and distinctive Character in which they excel. This is most palpable in those Authors, whose Character consists in Humour. Let any one read Terence, as he is translated by Mr. Echard, and he will take him to have been a Buffoon: Whereas Terence never dealt in such a Kind of low Mirth. His true Character is, to have afforded to his Spectators and Readers the gravest, and, at the same Time, the most agreeable, most polite Entertainment of any antient Author now extant. ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... paintings on the walls and the vases are remarkably well preserved. This tomb contains the ashes of the dependents of Tiberius, the contemporary of our Lord. One pigeon-hole is filled with the calcined bones of the court buffoon, a poor deaf and dumb slave who had wonderful powers of mimicry, and used to amuse his morose master by imitating the gesticulations of the advocates pleading in the Forum. Another pigeon-hole contains the remains of the keeper of the library of Apollo in the imperial palace on the Palatine. A most ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... his wife, and it turned out to be the last; but from that moment the older man had something of dignity in the eyes of this younger man, who had merely judged of him by his little foibles and eccentricities, and would have been ready to dismiss him contemptuously as a buffoon. There was something, then, behind that powerful face, with its deep-cut lines, its heavy eyebrows and piercing and sometimes sad eyes, besides a mere liking for tricks of childish diplomacy. Lavender began to have some respect for Sheila's father, and made ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... avail to procure any better usage for the unfortunate judge, whose health was suffering severely under his privations. Ivan, however, had recommended himself in the same way as Leo, by his perfections as a cook, and moreover he was a capital buffoon. His fetters were sometimes taken off that he might divert the villagers by his dances and strange antics while his master played the guitar. Sometimes they sang Russian songs together to the instrument, and ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and I don't understand you. I don't know either of you, but it's clear that if Gangnet is a poet, you're a buffoon. Must you go on talking? ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... The name may be a misreading of Twiss (Horace Twiss, 1787-1849, politician, buffoon, and Mrs. Siddons' nephew), who was quite a likely person to be lied about in joke at ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... being dedicated to you, and by that tide adopted for yours, rather than to be fathered as my own. And it is a chance if there be wanting some quarrelsome persons that will shew their teeth, and pretend these fooleries are either too buffoon-like for a grave divine, or too satyrical for a meek christian, and so will exclaim against me as if I were vamping up some old farce, or acted anew the Lucian again with a peevish snarling at all things. But those who are offended at the lightness and pedantry of this subject, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... guardians of the public taste and morals, seem to have deserted this important trust. Applause which ought to be measured out with scrupulous justice, correctness and precision, has been by admiring ignorance, poured forth in a torrent roar of uncouth and obstreperous glee on the buffoon, "the clown that says more than is set down for him," and on "the robustious perriwig-pated fellow, who tears a passion all to rags," while chaste merit and propriety have often gone unrewarded ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... of sympathetic magic in agriculture developed into the comic drama, and the demons became stereotyped figures of comedy, always recognizable by their masks (faces of a vulgar type), exaggerated hips, and above all by the phallus. The demon turned into the clown or buffoon, but the phallus was kept as an emblem of his role, like the later cap and bells of the fool, until the fifth century of the Christian era in the West, and until the fall of the Byzantine empire. In the Hellenistic period the clown ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... politely—"McTurk"—the Irishman scowled—"and, of course, the unspeakable Beetle, our friend Gigadibs." Abanazar, the Emperor, and Aladdin had more or less of characters, and King passed them over. "Come forth, my inky buffoon, from behind yonder instrument of music! You supply, I presume, the doggerel for this entertainment. Esteem yourself to be, as it ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... mother: 'Your brother is dying.' She grew very pale. My uncle was scarcely ever mentioned in the house, and I did not know him at all; all I knew from public talk was, that he had led, and was still leading, the life of a buffoon. After having spent his fortune with an incalculable number of women, he had only retained two mistresses, with whom he was living in small apartments in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... bursting into 'the loud guffaw' which does not always 'bespeak the empty mind.'" The Pall Mall Gazette says it contains "Plenty of boisterous humour of the Max Adeler kind ... humour that is genuine and spontaneous. The author, for all his antics, has a good deal more in him than the average buffoon. There is, for example, a very clever and subtle strain of feeling running through the comedy in 'The Love that Burned'—a rather striking bit of work. Mr Raven Hill's illustrations are as amusing as they always are." The St. James's Budget accorded this book a very long notice, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... That fellow dressed like a buffoon, with the parrot on his wrist,—for what purpose is he introduced ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... at seeing a paragraph headed "Sibthorpe's conversion." Our nose grew pale with terror; our hump heaved with agitation. We thought there existed a greater genius than ourselves and that some one had discovered that Sibthorp could be converted into anything but a Member for Lincoln, and buffoon-in-waiting to the House of Commons. We found, however, that it alluded to a Reverend, and not to OUR Colonel. Really the newspaper people should be more careful. Such startling announcements ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... almost impossible and had spent the proceeds in so reckless and extravagant a fashion as to bring the country to the verge of bankruptcy. Bolivia, similarly governed, was still the scene of the orgies and carnivals which had for some time characterized its unfortunate history. One of its buffoon "presidents," moreover, had entered into boundary agreements with both Chile and Brazil, under which the nation lost several important areas and some of its territory on the Pacific. The boundaries of Bolivia, indeed, were run almost everywhere on purely arbitrary lines drawn with scant regard ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... noted, and have the effect of some rare and beautiful flower pinned into his buttonhole. He is the confidant of his intrigues, his guest when he gives small, special entertainments, his daily familiar table companion, and the buffoon whose sly humor one stimulates, and whose worst ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... critics that rose up among the assembled people to question the divine right of kings to do wrong. We may be sure the real Thersites, from whom the poet drew his picture, was a very different and a far more serious power in debate than the misshapen buffoon of the Iliad. But the king who had been thwarted and exposed by him in the day would, over his cups in the evening, enjoy the poet's travesty, and long for the good old times when he could put down all impertinent criticism by the stroke of his knotty sceptre. The Homeric Agora could hardly ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... been laid in the reign of King James. That monarch, who in figure, manners, and mind was in the strongest contrast to all the English kings who had preceded him, was infinitely more mischievous than a more foolish monarch could have been. Coarse in manner—a buffoon in demeanor—so weak, that in many matters he suffered himself to be a puppet in the hands of the profligates who surrounded him, he had yet a certain amount of cleverness, and an obstinacy which nothing could overcome. He brought ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... ruthlessly put him in his place as a good fellow and nothing more. The truth was that in the Washington of the 'forties, neither the inner nor the outer Lincoln could by itself find lodgment. Neither the lonely mystical thinker nor the captivating buffoon could do more than ripple its surface. As superficial as Springfield, it lacked Springfield's impulsive generosity. To the long record of its obtuseness it had added another item. The gods had sent it ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... day. Rabelais seems to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a great musician and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, liked nothing so well as to bring into his house any buffoon or strolling-player to make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hot-tempered, forgiving, and with a power of learning and a power of work which were prodigious, even in those hard-working days. Rabelais chaffs ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... assented to anything. He chose only his late supporters: Glencairn who raised his standard in 1653; Rothes, a humorous and not a cruel voluptuary; and, as Secretary for Scotland in London, Lauderdale, who had urged him to take the Covenant, and who for twenty years was to be his buffoon, his favourite, and his wavering and unscrupulous adviser. Among these greedy and treacherous profligates there would, had he survived, have been no ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... view than to give utterance to a few sentimental odes and elegant ballads of their own, and for this reason they have fictitiously invented the names and surnames of both men and women, and necessarily introduced, in addition, some low characters, who should, like a buffoon in a play, create some excitement ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... never tired of reading English books, of being polite to English travellers, and of doing his best, in the intervals of more serious labours, to destroy the reputation of that deplorable English buffoon, whom, unfortunately, he himself had been so foolish as first to introduce to the attention of his countrymen. But it is curious to notice how, as time went on, the force of Voltaire's nature inevitably carried him further and further ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... testimony to the solid worth of a Forsyte that she should always thus be a 'little thing'—the little thing was bored. Why shouldn't she amuse herself? Soames was rather tiring; and as to Mr. Bosinney—only that buffoon George would have called him the Buccaneer—she maintained that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... serious old men; one was a model, a native of Frascati, with the face of a venerable apostle; the other, for contrast, looked like a buffoon and was the possessor of a grotesque nose, long, thin at the end and adorned with ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... absolutely odious, utter disgust being excited by his drinking bouts at all hours, his wild expenses, his gross amours, the day spent in sleeping or walking off his debauches, and the night in banquets and at theaters, and in celebrating the nuptials of some comedian or buffoon. It is related that, drinking all night at the wedding of Hippias, the comedian, on the morning, having to harangue the people, he came forward, overcharged as he was, and vomited before them all, one of his friends holding ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... some moments, but when Renwick came to a straight reach of road which led toward the tobacco factory buildings he was surprised to find that Herr Linke was nowhere in sight. The man was an enigma, a curious mixture of desperado and buffoon, but his sudden disappearance without a word of thanks, apology or explanation, gave Renwick something to puzzle over as he made his way to the bridge. Its possible significance escaped him until he had reached the river, when, a thought ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... organise the Church of England by being "unscrupulous, indifferent, a coward, and a time-server." James I. was given to "stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears," alternating between the buffoon and the pedagogue. James II. "amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek"; he was "a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving." The country gentleman of that age talked like "the most ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... and up went Baden-Powell to the piano, as if obeying an order. In a few minutes the whole place was in a roar, and, as one of the officers told me, the regiment recognised that in B.-P. they had got "a born buffoon, ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead, and the new one not appointed yet—but the masquing goes on the same." (Letter ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... man sank his voice into a whisper; "he is the sublimest buffoon that ever existed. I will tell you an instance—Do you like these Hungary wines, by the by?—On the 9th of last June, the Czar carried me, and half-a-dozen more of the foreign ministers, to his pleasure-house (Peterhoff). Dinner, as usual, all drunk with Tokay, and finished by a quart of brandy ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... acquaintance whatsoever a condescension, nor accept it from the greatest upon unworthy or ignominious terms. I know a certain lord that has often invited a set of people, and proposed for their diversion a buffoon player, and an eminent poet, to be of the party; and which was yet worse, thought them both sufficiently recompensed by the dinner, and the honour of his company. This kind of insolence is risen to such a height, that I my self was the other day sent to by a man with a title, whom I had ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... soldier of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,—a buffoon addicted to choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... interests or those of his people might require. He could use bold and loud words in public, and then secretly make his peace with those he had denounced. He was so given to rough jokes that the intendant, Meules, calls him a buffoon; but his buffoonery seems to have been often a cover to his craft. He had taken a prominent part in the council of the preceding summer at Montreal; and, doubtless, as he stood in full dress before the governor and the officers, his ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... heart and mind and self, never in tune; Sad for the most part, then in such a flow Of spirits, I seem now hero, now buffoon." LEIGH HUNT. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... hope was this! I realised too soon The special form of Nemesis That waits on the buffoon: The joke I found concerned the gloom Inside ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... 'He is not a good mimick.' One of the company added, 'A merry Andrew, a buffoon.' JOHNSON. 'But he has wit too, and is not deficient in ideas, or in fertility and variety of imagery, and not empty of reading; he has knowledge enough to fill up his part. One species of wit he has ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... enjoying a farce I could not see. He, like the mahu, was one of those mishaps of nature assigned to play an absurd and sorry part in the tragicomedy of life in which all must act the roles assigned by the great author-manager until death puts us out of the cast. In that scene I myself was the buffoon of fate. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Who could eclipse Robichon if his performance of the part equalled his conception of it? At the theatre that evening Quinquart followed Suzanne about the wings pathetically. He was garbed like a buffoon, but he felt like Romeo. The throng that applauded his capers were far from suspecting the romantic longings under his magenta wig. For the first time in his life he was thankful that the author hadn't given him more ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... The buffoon also laid himself on a chair, and had it carried about the room, during which he threw out his limbs in imitation of the act of swimming. Haydn supplied an accompaniment so suitable that Kurz soon landed on terra firma, and congratulated the composer, assuring him that he was the man ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon." ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Their father was a most depraved character. Their life and practices are well described in the language of the Apostle, Let us eat and drink, for to morrow we die. 1 Cor. xv. 32. The man was the buffoon of their company, and became more depraved every year. They often had a great deal of money, which was, no doubt, obtained through dishonest means. On one occasion, he and many other Gipsies, entered the parlour of a small public house on the borders of Hants, when emptying the contents ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... whom, when alive, he ran like a screaming hare; but permitted those who had lost their all in supporting his father's cause, to pine in misery and want. He would give to a painted harlot a thousand pounds for a loathsome embrace, and to a player or buffoon a hundred for a trumpery pun, but would refuse a penny to the widow or orphan of an old Royalist soldier. He was the personification of selfishness; and as he loved and cared for no one, so did no one love or care for him. So little had ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... he said gently, "I regret to say that another change has overtaken us. Have you ever heard of 'harlequin fate'? 'Tis a very buffoon of mischief and irony that is often permitted to dog our earthly footsteps and prevent us from becoming too content with our lot. For a time you and I, little maid, good comrades though we have been, must tread different paths. Your mother and I are going ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the fact that magnetism is by no means confined to those who have finely trained intellects or who have achieved great reputations. Some vaudeville buffoon or some gypsy fiddler may have more attractive power than the virtuoso who had spent years in developing his mind and his technic. The average virtuoso thinks far more of his "geist," his "talent" (or as Emerson would have it, "the shadow of the soul—the otherwise") ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... poetical beauties (and they are many) are unfortunately, as Hallam rightly remarks, intermingled with a great deal of coarse buffoonery. Possibly he had to consult the taste of his public in introducing such a large ingredient of this buffoon element—taken from what I called the Muenchhausen portion of the old legend. Patriotic German commentators sometimes deny that Goethe knew Marlowe's play (though he knew Shakespeare well), but I think there is no doubt that the ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... still treated every day on the boards at Naples; the same rough daubs, half improvised on the spur of the moment; the same frankly coarse and indecent gayety. The Odeon where we are now, was the Pompeian San Carlino. Bucco, the stupid and mocking buffoon; the dotard Pappus, who reminds us of the Venetian Pantaloon; Mandacus, who is the Neapolitan Guappo; the Oscan Casnar, a first edition of Cassandra; and finally, Maccus, the king of the company, the Punchinello who still survives and flourishes,—such were the ancient ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... the castle, is the famed Tun of Heidelberg, constructed by one of the electors at the suggestion of his buffoon, whose statue is placed near this enormous tun, which can contain 326,000 bottles. We were told that the jester (some will not allow him to be called the fool) assisted his master in drinking eighteen bottles of the best Rhenish wine daily. The table where they sat, near the tun, ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... "Indeed I am a dead man and 'tis the intention of this woman to peach upon me." Presently her husband asked her, "What be these four histories?" and answered she, "I saw four men each and every of whom was an antic fellow, a droll, a buffoon; furthermore, O my lord, one and all of them were garbed in gaberdine and bonnet."—And Shahrazad was surprised by the dawn of day and fell silent and ceased saying her permitted say. Then quoth her sister Dunyazad, "How sweet and tasteful is thy tale, O sister mine, and how enjoyable ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Vesuvius. He was entitled the "Band in the Wreath of the Gods," because with his fate that of all the rest was bound up. His death, ominously foretold from eldest antiquity, would be the signal for the ruin of the universe. Asa Loki was the Momus Satan or Devil Buffoon of the Scandinavian mythology, the half amusing, half horrible embodiment of wit, treachery, and evil; now residing with the gods in heaven, now accompanying Thor on his frequent adventures, now visiting and plotting with his ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... proper mammas, who teach their children to behave "pretty"—thinking good and quiet synonymous. Somehow, the little fellows, unfortunately, take the Lark for Mr. Spohf, who has hitherto done the funny in a refined style, scarcely to be imagined—an elegant, amiable, fun,—a mixture of the buffoon and gentleman, the sublime and the ridiculous, quite marvellous to behold,—making our little friend (who you are aware was moulded in one of Nature's odd freaks) appear, to tender imaginations, almost supernatural. The mistake and misplaced approbation ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... metropolis. In London he loved to frequent those streets where the old bookshops were, Wardour Street, Princes Street, Seven Dials (where the shop has been long closed): he loved also Gray's Inn, in the garden of which he met Dodd, just before his death ("with his buffoon mask taken off"); and the Temple, into which you pass from the noise and crowd of Fleet Street,—into the quiet and "ample squares and green recesses," where the old Dial," the garden god of Christian gardens," then told of Time, and where the still living fountain sends up its song ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... would be more uneasy in their company, than he was with Crispinus, their forefather, in the Holy Way; and would no more have allowed them a place amongst the critics, than he would Demetrius the mimic, and Tigellius the buffoon; ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... from Petersburg; smokes, drinks, and plays cards with them; calls them by their Christian names. What they find to like in him it is rather hard to comprehend. He is not clever; he is not amusing; he is not even a buffoon. It is true they treat him with friendly casualness, as a good-natured fellow, but rather a fool; they chum with him for two or three weeks, and then all of a sudden do not recognise him in the street, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... now arrived at the end of my list of military anecdotes. I have just spoken of a general's promotion, and will close with the story of a simple drummer, but a drummer renowned throughout the army as a perfect buffoon, in fact, the famous Rata, to whom General Gros, as we shall see; was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Conshy; no more than the extra tumbler; those who are delicate need not read it; those who are indelicate won't be the worse of it."—"But," persists Conshy—"I have other hairs in your neck, Master Tommy—you are growing a bit of a buffoon on us, and sorry am I to say it, sometimes not altogether, as a man with a rank imagination may construe you, a very decent one. Now, my good boy, I would have you to remember that what you write is condemned in the pages of Old Christopher to an amber immortalization," ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... this time appear, has been so well acted, that had it not been the afternoon you set for your third appearance, I should have never known you. I think you make a better Quaker boy than you did a crazy man last time, or buffoon and tumbler the first one. But what have you been able to ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... in particular, nearly all simple folks, had a desire to laugh, even when they were worn out with fatigue, which made a pretext of the slightest thing, and notably of danger. One of them, called Tailleur, a buffoon with the airs of an executioner's assistant, would call out at the first explosions of ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... and buffoon, was born about the year 1460, and educated at what he calls "Alma parens, O Cantabrigensis." Tutor to Prince Henry, afterward Henry VIII., he could boast, "The honour of England I lernyd to spelle." That he was highly esteemed in his day we ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... and unqualified fool," said the king, laughing, "and if it was not against my conscience, and unworthy of human nature, to engage a man as a perpetual buffoon, I would promote you to the office of court fool. You might, at least, serve as an example to my cavaliers, by teaching them what they ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... kind of beggarly baron, who was treated as a buffoon, was invited in the year 1743 to dine with Baron Pejaczewitz, when Trenck happened to be present. The conversation happened to turn on a kind of brandy made in this country, and Trenck jocularly said he annually distilled ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... would pay for them abundantly in promises, which he kept or not, as his own interests or those of his people might require. He could use bold and loud words in public, and then secretly make his peace with those he had denounced. He was so given to rough jokes that the intendant, Meules, calls him a buffoon; but his buffoonery seems to have been often a cover to his craft. He had taken a prominent part in the council of the preceding summer at Montreal; and, doubtless, as he stood in full dress before the governor ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... the climax: that I should show my long beard and white hairs amid that throng of women and lunatics; and clap and yell in unseemly rapture over the vile contortions of an abandoned buffoon. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... I declare that this buffoon was an indefatigable student, a proficient in all the learned languages, an elegant poet, and, withal, a wit of no inferior class. It remains to discover why ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... I suppose, Andrei Petrovitch?... You don't answer me... why don't you answer?' Shubin began again: 'Oh, if you feel happy, be quiet, be quiet! I chatter because I am a poor devil, unloved, I am a jester, an artist, a buffoon; but what unutterable ecstasy would I quaff in the night wind under the stars, if I knew that I were loved!... Bersenyev, are ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... of Louis Philippe, he replied: "I am not a court buffoon." When a generous compensation was hinted at, he answered: "I do not sell my loves." When it was urged that the occasion was a birth-day fete to be given his father by the Duke of Orleans, he accepted the invitation upon three conditions, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... other object in view than to give utterance to a few sentimental odes and elegant ballads of their own, and for this reason they have fictitiously invented the names and surnames of both men and women, and necessarily introduced, in addition, some low characters, who should, like a buffoon in a play, create ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... entitled, a Tale of a Tub. Had this writing been published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts, and the effects of publick resentment, but has been caressed and patronised by persons of great figure, and of all ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles. He complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and that in "Coriolanus"—a play which Dennis "improved" for the new stage—he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a most undignified fashion.[14] Gildon, again, says that Shakspere must have read Sidney's "Defence of Posey" and therefore, ought to have known the rules and that his neglect of them was owing to laziness. "Money seems to have been his aim more than reputation, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the end of my list of military anecdotes. I have just spoken of a general's promotion, and will close with the story of a simple drummer, but a drummer renowned throughout the army as a perfect buffoon, in fact, the famous Rata, to whom General Gros, as we ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the ivory, apes, and peacocks of existence. He seems less French than he is in his self-mockery, yet he is a true son of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted his homage. "All is relative," ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... slave, with a stool on her head, was at length permitted to exercise her independent talents. She neither danced, nor sung, nor played on the flute; her skill was confined to the pantomime arts; she excelled in buffoon characters, and as often as the comedian swelled her cheeks, and complained with a ridiculous tone and gesture of the blows that were inflicted, the whole theatre of Constantinople resounded with laughter and applause. The beauty of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... of course neglected by the fiddling, gambling, wenching, royal buffoon, who succeeded the royal martyr, and whose necessities he had supplied, when an outcast pauper exile in a foreign land, from the proceeds of those very estates which he had so nearly lost in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... makes fun of his ugliness, of his age, of the fact that he is pitted with small-pox—laughs at all those things that prevented him from pleasing the woman he loved, and makes the public laugh—and his heart is broken. Poor red queue! What eternal and incurable sorrows there be in the gaiety of a buffoon! What a lugubrious business is ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... railing," he repeated, with glistening eyes, "you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... during long years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... fill the Jaxartes and the Bactrus and the Dajlah and the Euphrates and the river of Basrah and the stream of Antioch and the Orontees and the Nile of Egypt and the Salt Sea and the ebb and the flow of the Ocean, I will not let thee taste a morsel. But, said the buffoon, if thou wish to eat of chicken and white bread and lamb and sweets and mutton patties, go thou to the house of Ja'afar son of Yahya the Barmeky, who hath received hospitality from a Damascus man named Attaf. He bestoweth charity in honour of him in this manner, and he neither ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... to play the part of a clown or buffoon, acting in a very silly and stupid manner, while the others looked on laughing and pointing their fingers at him ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... the Shorter Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in and manoeuvred the limelight—all too like the old devil of the mediaeval drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon and a laughing-stock indeed. And while he could unveil villainy, as is the case pre-eminently in Huish in the Ebb-Tide, he shrank from inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... are by Tully called absolute, and most elegant and various poems. Lucian, who was emulous of this Menippus, seems to have imitated both his manners and his style in many of his dialogues, where Menippus himself is often introduced as a speaker in them and as a perpetual buffoon; particularly his character is expressed in the beginning of that dialogue which is called [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]. But Varro in imitating him avoids his impudence and filthiness, and only expresses ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... gladness in the worship of God—that it consisted simply of a chronic case of the snuffles. Jones has simply gone to the opposite extreme and transformed the Temple of the Deity into a variety dive. Nero fiddled while Rome burned; but Jones indulges in the levity of the buffoon while consigning millions of human beings to Hell. Alas, that so few preachers understand the pity ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a universal actor—comedian, tragedian, buffoon—all in one. There was no shade of human emotion which he did not seem capable of giving ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... psychological penetration, an almost profound sense of the ridiculous, joyous fooling; above all, that first essential of satire, to be himself amused by what he wrote to amuse others; all these he possessed in a high degree. Rabelais has been called the Homeric buffoon, Lucian ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... There is a point when he ceases to be a buffoon and becomes a madman. I beg you to remember your own expression: 'Do you know how powerful a single man may be?' Please don't laugh about it, he's quite capable of pulling a trigger. They are convinced that I am a spy ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... no doubt to remain as to their talking. Then there is superabundant proof of the relish with which men enjoyed, in the Middle Ages, silly, teazing or puzzling answers; the questioner remaining at the end rolled up in the repartees, gasping as a fly caught in a spider's web. The Court fool or buffoon had for his principal merit his clever knack of returning witty or confusing answers; the best of them were preserved; itinerant minstrels remembered and repeated them; clerks turned them into Latin, and gave them place in their collections of exempla. They afforded amusement ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... I'm mad, stark raving mad, To have a Woman young, rich, beautiful, Just on the point of yielding to my Love, Snatcht from my Arms by such a Beast as this; An old ridiculous Buffoon, past Pleasure, Past Love, or any thing that tends that way; Ill-favour'd, ill-bred, and ill-qualify'd, With more Diseases than a Horse past Service; And only blest with Fortune and my Julia; For him, I say, this Miser, to obtain her, After my tedious nights and days of Love, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... repeated, caused Poinsinet to be fully convinced of his ugliness; he used to go about in companies, and take every opportunity of inveighing against himself; he made verses and epigrams against himself; he talked about "that dwarf, Poinsinet;" "that buffoon, Poinsinet;" "that conceited, hump-backed Poinsinet;" and he would spend hours before the glass, abusing his own face as he saw it reflected there, and vowing that he grew handsomer at every fresh ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... clothed in white and wore big buttons. Later, he wore a suit of bedtick, with white and blue checks, the coarse mattress cloth of the period. Hence his name. The word that meant straw was afterward used for mattress which was stuffed with straw and then for the buffoon, who wore the mattress cloth suit. In France the Paillasse, as I have said, was the same as Pagliaccio. Sometimes he wore a red checked suit, but the genuine one was known by the colors, white and blue. He wore blue stockings, short ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... as we called him; I suppose as a term of endearment, for there was no Young Longbow. He was an Irishman, and the established wit, buffoon, and jester of the school. Innumerable stories are still told of his youthful escapades, of his audacity and skill in cribbing, of his dexterity in getting out of scrapes, of his repartees to masters and persons in ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... be you?" and again he laughed. "Wal, I reckon, ever'one here believes that yarn. It fits tew pat, not tew be true. So me an' Spike are th' true murderers, be we? Wal, this is sum unexpected an' s'prisin', ain't it Spike?" and he turned to his comrade, grinning and glaring like a huge buffoon; but a close observer might have noticed that his skin had whitened beneath ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... great fakirs a posthumous vogue," Cairy remarked with a yawn. "If it were not for America,—for the Mississippi Valley of America, one might say,—Ibsen would have had a quiet grave, and Shaw might remain the Celtic buffoon. But the women of the Mississippi Valley have made a gospel out of them.... It is as interesting to hear them discuss the new dogmas on marriage as it is to ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... smooth over a rough place in his official intercourse with a funny story fitting the case in point, and they called him a trifler. He would round off a logical argument with a familiar example, hitting the nail squarely on the head and driving it home, and they called him a buffoon. Big wigs and little wigs were agreed that he lowered the dignity of debate; as if debates were intended to mystify, and not to clarify truth. Yet he went on and on, and never backward, until his time was come, when his genius, fully developed, rose ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... becomes a formidable opponent to Theodorick and his chivalry; but as he attempted by treachery to attain the victory, he is, when overcome, condemned to fill the dishonourable yet appropriate office of buffoon and juggler at the Court ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... Hon'ble Punch, who regarded me as a son, such a portrait was the very antipode to his majestic lineaments, nor was it reasonable to suppose that he would allow his counterfeit presentment to be depicted in the undignified garbage of a buffoon! ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... terms with the priests, that he visited church, and on feast days actually went to confession! He a heretic? He was a chatterbox, a boastful coward, nothing more! But the day of reckoning was at hand, and soon there would be nothing left of the great philosopher but a quill-driving buffoon. ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... magazine, to be called the Quarterly Review. The project was a daring one, in view of Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne, a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a place betrays in Scott's eminently sane and balanced mind a curious strain of impracticality, to say the ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... old men; one was a model, a native of Frascati, with the face of a venerable apostle; the other, for contrast, looked like a buffoon and was the possessor of a grotesque nose, long, thin at the end and adorned ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... "You were always a buffoon," he cried. "What do you mean, you numskull, by saying that they are Prussians? How could Prussians be coming from the direction of France? You have lost any wits that you ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... clubs are founded upon eating and drinking, which are points wherein most men agree, and in which the learned and illiterate, the dull and the airy, the philosopher and the buffoon, can all of them bear a part. The Kit-Cat itself is said to have taken its original from a mutton pie. The Beef-Steak and October clubs are neither of them averse to eating and drinking, if we may form a judgment of them from their ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self-indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... from herself, signed under her own name, making an appointment for that night; but at the same time Galliard, claiming a former promise, drags his friend off to visit Euphemia. The intrigue is complicated by the ridiculous amours of two foolish travellers, Sir Signal Buffoon and Mr. Tickletext, a puritan divine, his tutor. These, unknown to each other, make assignations with the two bona robas by means of Petro, who dupes them thoroughly by his clever tricks, and pockets their money. Whilst Galliard and Sir Harry are serenading the ladies, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... by Dr. Antommarchi, had been moulded in bronze and sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe, and had then inspired surprise and mistrust. People suspected the Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and famished, of having tried to make fun of people. Disciples of Dr. Gall, whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious. They did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the forehead, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... The practice of introducing lyrics was in vogue long before the playwrights of Shakespeare's time displayed their use so perfectly. From this point onwards the drama rings with the rough drinking songs, pious hymns, and sweet lyrics of the buffoon, the preacher, and the lover. Thus, turning haphazard to The Trial of Treasure, the Interlude immediately preceding Like Will to Like in the volume of Dodsley's Old English Plays, we find no less than eight songs. Like Will to Like has also eight. ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... in their night-shirts, would see sleighs come galloping down, with a jangle of bells, full of laughing, singing young people, returning from some excursion far up in the hills, where there had been feasting and dancing. Here a young lawyer—newly married and something of a privileged buffoon—was sitting on the lap of somebody else's wife, playing a concertina, and singing at the top of his voice. "Some of that Loreng man's doings again," people would say. "The place has never been the same since he came here." And they would get back to bed again, shaking ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... conclusion that as a people we are specially blessed with a sense of humour, a curious non sequitur which the restraint, consciously or unconsciously inculcated by the Gaelic League, is likely to make more apparent, for it is killing that conception of the Irishman as typically a boisterous buffoon with intervals of maudlin sentimentality which the stage and the popular song have so long been content to depict without protest from us, and which left Englishmen with feelings not more exalted than those of their sixteenth and seventeenth century ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... worthy, modest, sober, and loyal man does not exist in his majesty's dominions than this distinguished poet, whom some of his waggish friends have taken up the absurd fancy of exhibiting in print as a sort of boozing buffoon; and who is now, instead of revelling in the license of tavern-suppers and party politics, bearing up, as he may, against severe and unmerited misfortunes, in as dreary a solitude as ever nursed the melancholy of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... fancy to be known by the names of mountains and rivers—in a fashion which recalled the tournament. There was also another personage, with a Dan Leno-like face and an extraordinary gift of contorting his legs, who played the buffoon, and gyrated round the dignified M.C., who remained unmoved while the audience laughed. It was evidently the right thing for the prizes—they were awarded at the end of each bout—to be presented as comically as ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... Rupilius was already moving) fell on each others swords. But Eunus could not face this death. He took refuge in a cave, from which he was dragged with the last poor relics of his splendid court—his cook, his baker, his bath attendant and his buffoon. The Romans for some reason spared his life, or at least did not doom him to immediate death. He was kept a prisoner at Morgantia, where he died ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... in a way," commented the King. "The sword does make things beautiful. It has made the whole world romantic by now. And to think people once thought me a buffoon for suggesting a romantic Notting Hill. Deary me, deary me! (I think that is the expression)—it seems ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... dance, having then the diversion of the spectator, in the way of laughing, for its object, should preserve a moderately buffoon simplicity, and the dancer, aided by a natural genius, but especially by throwing as much nature as possible into his execution, may promise himself to amuse and please the spectator; even though he should not be very deep in the grounds of his art; provided he has a good ear, and some pretty or ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... one who is tolerant of the whims of a hired buffoon,—and, this time seating himself in his ebony chair, was about to commence dictating his Second Canto when Theos, yielding to his desire to speak aloud the idea that had just flashed ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... any better usage for the unfortunate judge, whose health was suffering severely under his privations. Ivan, however, had recommended himself in the same way as Leo, by his perfections as a cook, and moreover he was a capital buffoon. His fetters were sometimes taken off that he might divert the villagers by his dances and strange antics while his master played the guitar. Sometimes they sang Russian songs together to the instrument, and on these occasions the Major's hands were released that he ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness.' Though—he says—he cannot wholly escape 'from some the imputation of sharpness,' he does not feel guilty of having offered insult to anyone, 'except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon.' But—'I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order of state I have provoked? ... What public person? Whether I have not, in all these, preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? ... Where have ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... what is pleasant in the way of relaxation or amusement: The mean state shall be called Easy-pleasantry, and the character accordingly a man of Easy-pleasantry; the excess Buffoonery, and the man a Buffoon; the man deficient herein a Clown, and his ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... the Supreme. "Hear my iron word. When the buffoon-witted Ning rises from his congenial slough this shall be his lot: for sixty thousand ages he shall fail to find the path of his return, but shall, instead, thread an aimless flight among the frozen ambits of the outer stars, ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... and Covent Garden and took their acting copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to draw ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... (buffoon), she groaned, "didn't you swear to separate from Nalini, and have you not taken all your meals with him ever since? Is that the action of a ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... horse, why he has a staff of aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals and admirals, doctors and commissariat officers, and they submit to be patronised by him. Half-priest, half-buffoon, something of a Friar Tuck and something of a Louis XV. abbe, he is a sort of privileged person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in love with a curate and a cavalry officer. Monseigneur Bauer, who combines in himself the unctuous ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... that was in him; the larger circle ruthlessly put him in his place as a good fellow and nothing more. The truth was that in the Washington of the 'forties, neither the inner nor the outer Lincoln could by itself find lodgment. Neither the lonely mystical thinker nor the captivating buffoon could do more than ripple its surface. As superficial as Springfield, it lacked Springfield's impulsive generosity. To the long record of its obtuseness it had added another item. The gods had sent it a great ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... me but in reality it means that she is grateful to you for being bold enough to utter a truth which she fully believes all competent people know, but which none has heretofore been brave enough to utter.) You see, the thing that gravels her is that I am so persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely covered my case—which she denies ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.'[1] ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... pleasure we feel in superiority. The desire for this refined modification of sympathy, may be the motive of good and great actions; but it cannot be trusted as a moral principle. Nero's love of sympathy, made him anxious to be applauded on the stage as a fiddler and a buffoon. Tiberius banished one of his philosophic courtiers, and persecuted him till the unfortunate man laid violent hands upon himself, merely because he had discovered that the emperour read books in the morning to prepare himself with questions for his literary society at night. Dionysius, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who took half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in for reading detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith, destined by his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our games, though he walked like a timid little old man and had a funny, cracked laugh. Tip worked hard in his father's grocery store every afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning. Even his recreations were laborious. He collected ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... hunter, grown grey in contending with the bears of the mountains. That legend had gradually passed away. His compatriots were right: Manin was nothing but a country clown. His deeds of prowess were now a subject of joke, and he was looked upon as the old buffoon of the mad, illustrious Senor ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,—a buffoon addicted to choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more about ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... anything but compliant. Lie, cheat, make every word a snare, and every act a forgery; but never contradict. Agree with people, and they make a couch for you in their hearts. You know the story of Dante and the buffoon. Both were entertained at the court of the vain pedant, who called himself Prince Scaliger,—the former poorly, the latter sumptuously. 'How comes it,' said the buffoon to the poet, 'that I am so rich and you so poor?' 'I shall be as rich ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... through the hole in the side door? And didst thou not say to me, 'I am sworn never to open the door till thou show me the purse?'" Quoth Hasan? "By Allah, 'twas not I who took it, but Zurayk!" Quoth Ali, "Needs must I get it again," and repaired to the house of the wedding, where he heard the buffoon[FN247] say, "Bravo,[FN248] O Abu Abdallah! Good luck to thee with thy son!" Said Ali, "My luck is in the ascendant," and going to the fishmonger's lodging, climbed over the back wall of the house and found his wife asleep. So he drugged her with Bhang and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... disdain to be copied by such hands! I dare answer for him, he would be more uneasy in their company, than he was with Crispinus, their forefather, in the Holy Way; and would no more have allowed them a place amongst the critics, than he would Demetrius the mimic, and Tigellius the buffoon; ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... misquote Latin over their cups! They are pleased to welcome me at their board, because the Roman doctors call me learned, and because Nature gave me a wild wit, which to them is pleasanter than the stale jests of a hired buffoon. Yes, they would advance my fortunes—but how? by some place in the public offices, which would fill a dishonoured coffer, by wringing, yet more sternly, the hard-earned coins from our famishing citizens! If there be ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ordinary loyal sentiment and esprit de corps. It is interesting to observe the different views the artists have severally taken of it, for most of them in turn have attempted his portrayal. Brine regarded him as a mere buffoon, devoid of either dignity or breeding; Crowquill, as a grinning, drum-beating Showman; Doyle, Thackeray, and others adhered to the idea of the Merry, but certainly not uproarious, Hunchback; Sir John Tenniel showed him as a vivified puppet, all that was earnest, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... himself. For some reason he had come to the conclusion that the less the settlers knew of pleasure the better, and therefore he laid down the law that all strolling popular entertainers should be forbidden to enter the holy city. No public buffoon ever cracked his jokes at Herrnhut. No tight-rope dancer poised on giddy height. No barrel-dancer rolled his empty barrel. No tout for lotteries swindled the simple. No juggler mystified the children. No cheap-jack cheated the innocent maidens. No quack-doctor ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... on in this fashion. But his incapacity for doing anything as well as his impassiveness eventually exasperated his relatives, and he became a laughing-stock, a sort of martyred buffoon, a prey given over to native ferocity, to the savage gaiety of the brutes ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... at her. Underground politician that he was, he knew that Mirabelle had utterly destroyed the half of his ambition. She had made him a laughing-stock, a buffoon, a political joke. To think that his name was connected with a crusade against short-skirts and dancing—Ugh! Not even the average run of church-goers would swallow it. "Mayor!" he thought bitterly. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... looks around, assumes the posture of an actor playing the role of Orestes, and the posture of a bad actor too; he declaims Greek verses, and looks to see if we are admiring him. We admire him apparently; and instead of saying to him, Go to sleep, thou buffoon! we bring ourselves also to the tone of tragedy, and protect the great artist from the Furies. By Castor! this news at least must have reached thee, that he has appeared in public at Naples. They drove in from the city and the surrounding towns all the Greek ruffians, who filled the ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... into an acrimonious attack upon Lincoln's conduct of the war, predicated upon a private letter of General Scott, the possession of which he did not satisfactorily account for. The Tribune, referring to his campaign as "a rhetorical spree," called him a "buffoon," a "political harlequin," a "repeater of mouldy jokes,"[852] and in bitter terms denounced his "low comedy performance at Tammany," his "double-shuffle dancing at Mozart Hall," his possession of a letter "by dishonourable means for a dishonourable purpose," and his wide-sweeping ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the company mostly rode, would have better served him) got somewhat too Merry on Rhenish about Dusk, and was carried out to the stable, where the Palefreneers littered him down with straw, as though he had been a Horse or a Mule himself; and then a little fat Canon, who was the Buffoon or Jack Pudding of the party, sang songs over his drink which were not in the least like unto Hymns or Canticles, but rather of a most Mundane, not to say Loose, order of Chant. His Highness (who wore the Biggest Emerald ring on his right Forefinger, over his glove, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... sir, choose to make a buffoon of yourself," he said sharply, with a slight trembling of the lower jaw, "I can't prevent your doing so; but I warn you that if you dare to play the fool in my presence, I will teach ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Shakspere is decidedly "light," and I rather fancy that he would regard Aristophanes as heavy. If one were to suggest, on his proposing to place the Irving Shakspere on the shelves of a free library, that the poet is often foolish, often a buffoon of a low type, often a mere quibbler, and often ribald, he might perhaps have a fit, or he might inquire if the speaker were mad—assuredly he would do something impressive; but he would not scruple to deliver an oration of the severest type if some sweet and innocent story of love and tenderness ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... too in the same place, one who wheadles as much as the other boasts, and plays the Knave as much as the other does the Fool. For the Reader's Satisfaction, here follows a Translation of the first Act of the Miles Gloriosus, which begins between that Blockhead and his Buffoon. ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... in the world a unique and never-to-be-forgotten role. It was inevitable that he should have stood out among the men of his time as a strange, bewildering figure. To his very matter-of-fact and much annoyed antagonist, Karl Marx, he was little more than a buffoon, the "amorphous pan-destroyer, who has succeeded in uniting in one person Rodolphe, Monte Cristo, Karl Moor, and Robert Macaire."[11] On the other hand, to his circle of worshipers he was a mental giant, a flaming titan, a Russian Siegfried, holding out ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... there is in them even occasional coarseness; but that the devil for instance should always be represented as a baffled fool, and made to play the buffoon sometimes after a disgusting fashion, was to them only the treatment he deserved: it was their notion of "poetic justice;" while most of them were too childish to be shocked at the discord thus introduced, and many, we may well ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... occupied some moments, but when Renwick came to a straight reach of road which led toward the tobacco factory buildings he was surprised to find that Herr Linke was nowhere in sight. The man was an enigma, a curious mixture of desperado and buffoon, but his sudden disappearance without a word of thanks, apology or explanation, gave Renwick something to puzzle over as he made his way to the bridge. Its possible significance escaped him until he ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... above the ordinary level. It was no light thing that on the very eve of the decisive struggle between our Kings and their Parliaments, royalty should be exhibited to the world stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears, trembling at a drawn sword, and talking in the style alternately of a buffoon and of a pedagogue. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... some considerable additions to the Appendix to General Preface. I am in the sentiments towards the public that the buffoon ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... though Harry Randall had been a wild and frolicsome youth in his Hampshire home, the effect of being a professional buffoon had actually made it a relaxation of effort to him to be grave, quiet, and slow in movement; and this was perhaps a more effectual disguise than the dark garments, and the false brown hair, beard, and moustache, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a popular name among the Dutch for a buffoon; a corruption of pickle-h[:a]rin ("a hairy sprite"), answering ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... exalt your head and seek for praise, you will be called a boaster and a coxcomb; if you lead a godly life and resort to the church and the altar, you will be called a hypocrite; if you do not, then you are an infidel or a heretic; if you be merry, you will be called a buffoon; if you are silent, you will be called a morose wretch; if you follow honesty, you are nothing but a simple fool; if you go neat, you are proud, if not, a swine; if you are smooth speaking, then you are false, or a trifler ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... think I am jesting," continued Porphyrius, more and more at his ease, without ceasing to indulge in his little laugh, whilst continuing his perambulation about the room. "You may be right. God has given me a face which only arouses comical thoughts in others. I'm a buffoon. But excuse an old man's cackle. You, Rodion Romanovitch, you are in your prime, and, like all young people, you appreciate, above all things, human intelligence. Intellectual smartness and abstract rational deductions entice you. But, to return to the SPECIAL CASE we were talking about just ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... firmness, of cold and audacious courage. The very politeness with which he gave brief and precise answers seemed dangerous, on his lips, in his half bow. And if the prison garb looked upon the others like the ridiculous costume of a buffoon, upon him it was not noticeable, so foreign was it to his personality. And although the other terrorists had been seized with bombs and infernal machines upon them, and Werner had had but a black revolver, the judges for some reason regarded him as the leader of the others and ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... that Fanfulla is not here to hear you, or they had been your last words for pretty though he be, Messer Fanfulla is a very monster of bloodthirstiness. With me it is different. I am a man of very gentle ways, as you may have heard, Messer Buffoon. But see that you forget at once my station and my name, or you may realise how little they need buffoons ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... that threw itself over and over like a tumbler, tittering, at the same time, like a human being. Swanhilda for a while kept herself quiet; but as the luminous antic ceased not practising his harlequinade, she peevishly exclaimed—'What buffoon is carrying on his fooleries here? I desire to be left in peace.' The light vanished instantly, and Swanhilda already had congratulated herself upon gaining her point, when suddenly a loud shrilly sound was heard—the floor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... vigor and stateliness by which the same language is equally characterized. Tacitus has been sometimes represented as a very Diogenes, for carping and sarcasm—a very Aristophanes, to blacken character with ridicule and reproach. But he is as far removed from the cynic or the buffoon, as from the panegyrist or the flatterer. He is not the indiscriminate admirer that Plutarch was. Nor is he such a universal hater as Sallust. It is the fault of the times that he is obliged to ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... of those persons whom, according to your character, you cannot think of without derisive laughter or an embarrassed shrug of the shoulders. Nature had made him a buffoon. He was a painter, but a very bad one, whom I had met in Rome, and I still remembered his pictures. He had a genuine enthusiasm for the commonplace. His soul palpitating with love of art, he painted the models who hung about the stairway of Bernini ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... that sprightly ladies, working between love and pleasure times, drew from the court fool for their conception of the mythological buffoon, reproducing Triboulet's great head; his mouth, proportionately large; his protruding eyes; his bowed back, short, twisted legs and long, muscular arms; and his nose far larger than that of Francis, who otherwise had the largest nose ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... had him closely watched. For he is a general disliker of us and of our doings; he is gathering together an enormous treasure, and he makes an open jest of our literary pursuits. You, for instance, he calls a philosophizing old woman, and me a dissolute buffoon and scamp. Consider what you would have done. For my part, I bear the fellow no ill will; but again, I say, take care that he does not do a mischief to yourself, or ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... pleasure and vice, after the Restoration, the actors, long starved and crestfallen, brushed up their plumes and burnished their tinsel. Killigrew, that clever buffoon of the Court, opened a new theatre in Drury Lane in 1663, with a play of Beaumont and Fletcher's; and Davenant (supposed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son) opened the little theatre, long disused, in Salisbury Court, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... these repeated and exhausted words throw into relief. Rhetoric is content to borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same phrase; and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some modem writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying his text ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... opened the theater to the public without charge, and gave notice that he would handsomely reward any one who would produce a new amusement. A Buffoon, well known for his jokes, said that he had a kind of entertainment that had never been produced in a theater. This report, being spread about, created a great stir in the place, and the theater was crowded to see ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... type was Sulimani, a big, one-eyed Monumwezi, who had a really keen wit coupled with an earnest, solemn manner. This man was no buffoon, however; and he was a good porter, always at or near the head of the procession. In the great jungle south of Kenia we came upon Cuninghame. When the head of our safari reached the spot Sulimani left the ranks and, his load still aloft danced solemnly in front of Cuninghame, chanting something in ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... certain tightening of the nerves, Peter followed his glance, but made out nothing through the fogging dust. When he looked around at Jim Pink again, the buffoon's face was a caricature of immense mirth. He shook it sober, abruptly, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Johnson said. 'He is not a good mimick[199].' One of the company added, 'A merry Andrew, a buffoon.' JOHNSON. 'But he has wit too, and is not deficient in ideas, or in fertility and variety of imagery, and not empty of reading; he has knowledge enough to fill up his part. One species of wit he has in an eminent ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... streets!—and was shown up by a young eunuch into the hareem, and found my old friend very poorly, but spent a pleasant evening with him, his young wife—a Georgian slave whom he had married,—his daughter by a former wife—whom he had married when he was fourteen, and the female dwarf buffoon of the Valideh Pasha (Ismail's mother) whose heart I won by rising to her, because she was so old and deformed. The other women laughed, but the little old dwarf liked it. She was a Circassian, and seemed clever. You see how the 'Thousand ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Jonathas, opening wide his little eyes, gave a forced, buffoon-like laugh. Nothing could be more absurd, said he, than the idea that a human body could have eternal life; and he declaimed, for the benefit of the proconsul, this line ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... in all probability he would have been of the same profession himself; a reply at once, sensible and witty. Mr. Wood, however, seems to be of opinion, that he was too much given to bantering, and that if he had thrown less of the buffoon or mimic into his conversation, his wit would have been very agreeable. He is charged by Wood with a higher failing, which ought indeed rather to be construed one of the blackest crimes, that is, ingratitude ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... steps and along the street to the station, where he could get a train back to the City in a few moments. To his own amazement, he was quite happy, he was even more than happy. A species of exaltation possessed him. Even the thought of himself, Arthur Carroll, posing nightly as a buffoon before the City crowds, did not daunt him. He realized a kind of joyful acquiescence with even that. He felt a happy patience when he considered the time that might elapse before he could see his family again. He passed the butcher's shop, and reflected with delight that he should be able to ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... those streets where the old bookshops were, Wardour Street, Princes Street, Seven Dials (where the shop has been long closed): he loved also Gray's Inn, in the garden of which he met Dodd, just before his death ("with his buffoon mask taken off"); and the Temple, into which you pass from the noise and crowd of Fleet Street,—into the quiet and "ample squares and green recesses," where the old Dial," the garden god of Christian gardens," then told of Time, and where the still living fountain ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... And then, avoiding the eye of the grand old saint, and hating myself as a buffoon, I continued, "My own conjecture is that something must have occurred to irritate the dramatist whilst he was writing that passage, and the expression slipped ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... and Worcester the Roman Catholic worship was violently interrupted. [106] At Bristol the rabble, countenanced, it was said, by the magistrates, exhibited a profane and indecent pageant, in which the Virgin Mary was represented by a buffoon, and in which a mock host was carried in procession. The garrison was called out to disperse the mob. The mob, then and ever since one of the fiercest in the kingdom, resisted. Blows were exchanged, and serious hurts inflicted. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... neighbouring platforms, seeing themselves ruined by the Laughing Man, were despairing, yet dazzled. All the grimacers, all the clowns, all the merry-andrews envied Gwynplaine. How happy he must be with the snout of a wild beast! The buffoon mothers and dancers on the tight-rope, with pretty children, looked at them in anger, and pointing out Gwynplaine, would say, "What a pity you have not a face like that!" Some beat their babes savagely for being pretty. More than one, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a buffoon for drunkards. The feasts of heathenism were wild orgies, very unlike the pure joy of the sacrificial meals in Jehovah's worship. Dagon's temple was filled with a drunken crowd, whose mirth would be made more boisterous by a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... society. In either case we moderns at least might haply desire the intervention of a beadle's hand as heavy and a sceptral cudgel as knotty as ever the son of Laertes applied to the shoulders of the first of the type or the tribe of Thersites. For this brutal and brutish buffoon—I am speaking of Shakespeare's Thersites—has no touch of humour in all his currish composition: Shakespeare had none as nature has none to spare for such dirty dogs as those of his kind or generation. There is not even what Coleridge with such exquisite happiness ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... made him, as Cicero says, absolutely odious, utter disgust being excited by his drinking bouts at all hours, his wild expenses, his gross amours, the day spent in sleeping or walking off his debauches, and the night in banquets and at theaters, and in celebrating the nuptials of some comedian or buffoon. It is related that, drinking all night at the wedding of Hippias, the comedian, on the morning, having to harangue the people, he came forward, overcharged as he was, and vomited before them all, one of his friends holding his gown for him. Sergius, the player, was ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... needy, and commended them all to me, asking me to help them for his sake. I protest I refused not one, and did for them all I could, to his great pleasure. Then, when I saw him beginning to be well, I told him we must have viols and violins, and a buffoon to make him laugh: which he did. In one month, we got him into a chair, and he had himself carried about in his garden and at the door of his chateau, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... private buffoon is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse; Yet though people forgive his transgression, There are one or two rules that all Family Fools ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... filthy. It is argued that this is all deliberate—is an effect of premeditation: that Rabelais had certain home-truths to deliver to his generation, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagot and the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... in my nature to derive consolation from such scenes; from theatres, whose buffoon laughter and discordant mirth awakened distempered sympathy, or where fictitious tears and wailings mocked the heart-felt grief within; from festival or crowded meeting, where hilarity sprung from the worst feelings of our nature, or such enthralment ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... buffoon, can't he?" said the stout lady in the corner to her companion, as she yawned again. She had scarcely tried to lower her voice. Her remark was, at any rate, quite audible to her next-door neighbor, who again threw her a swift, ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural for Hamlet—a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation—should express ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... suitor,—and had also recognised a certain honesty in the man's purpose, which had not been the less honest because it was so absurd. Actuated by the consciousness of this, he had swallowed his anger, and had told the whole truth. Nevertheless things had been said which were horrible to him. This buffoon of a man had called his Isabel a—pert poppet! How was he to get over the remembrance of such an offence? And then the wretch had declared that he was—enamoured! There was sacrilege in the term when applied by such a man to Isabel Boncassen. He had thoughts of days to ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... day at seeing a paragraph headed "Sibthorpe's conversion." Our nose grew pale with terror; our hump heaved with agitation. We thought there existed a greater genius than ourselves and that some one had discovered that Sibthorp could be converted into anything but a Member for Lincoln, and buffoon-in-waiting to the House of Commons. We found, however, that it alluded to a Reverend, and not to OUR Colonel. Really the newspaper people should be more careful. Such startling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... gewgaws and playthings, and I found, after not many days, that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank from my Lady's keeping-room to the antechamber, and thence to the servant's ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... thought to be as full of quibbling as a cock of dirt. Thou stinkest heavy with filth, and reekest of nought but sin. There is no need to lengthen the plea against a buffoon, whose strength is in an ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... and amusement. To be sure the creature was such a fool that it was not fair to think of him save as a buffoon. So unfortunately she chose amusement. "Oh, I vow, Sir George, your delicacy is rare," ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... dressed like a buffoon, with the parrot on his wrist,—for what purpose is he introduced into ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... We are all so in a minor degree. In each house, to each of our friends, we are unconsciously different in some particular. One man holds us in awe, and we unconsciously instil that feeling. Another considers us a buffoon, and, lo! ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... his cigar over the gunwale, "that the experiences of the past year have not been all an excursion into the 'Arabian Nights'? If it were not for that fine marble relief in my trunk which I bought of that miserable buffoon in the Via Sistina, I should easily persuade myself that the actual world were bounded on the east by the Atlantic and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. I was just considering whether I should try to smuggle it through the custom-house, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... day within the Hippodrome I, a buffoon in absurd clothes, Strive to make the thousands laugh; And when my act is done There comes the tread of camels' feet, Followed by Slayman Ali and his Arab troupe, Who tumble, jump and build pyramids Before a canvas ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... mind and self, never in tune; Sad for the most part, then in such a flow Of spirits, I seem now hero, now buffoon." ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... meal of victuals; ever itching to try his arts magic on great beasts and often meeting ludicrous failures therein; envious of the powers of others, and constantly striving to outdo them in what they do best; in short, little more than a malicious buffoon delighting in practical jokes, and abusing his superhuman powers for selfish and ignoble ends. But this is a low, modern, and corrupt version of the character of Michabo, bearing no more resemblance to his real and ancient one than ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... of the merest balderdash and doggerel that it was ever our bad fortune to lay eyes on. The author is a vulgar buffoon, and the editor a talkative, tedious old fool. We use strong language, but should any of our readers peruse the book, (from which calamity Heaven preserve them,) they will find reasons for it thick as the leaves of Vallumbrozer, or, to use a still ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... San Antonio—the baker, the buffoon, the two young men who dig. They are already baking and digging and joking. We have it from my officer, who has ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... come, in manhood's fiery noon, To steal his laurels from the stage buffoon; His sword of lath the harlequin may wield; Behold the star upon my lifted shield Though the just critic pass my humble name, And sweeter lips have drained the cup of fame, While my gay stanza pleased the banquet's lords, The soul ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... What did I wish to say! Ay, what did I wish to say! What is the use of my saying anything? What am I but a buffoon and a slovenly ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... regarded him as a hero. To Count Gregory Erdey she extended a smiling salutation from afar, which he requited by saluting her with his hat in one hand and his wig in another, which provoked a roar of Homeric laughter from the assembled guests. The young buffoon had had his head clean shaved in order that his hair might grow all the stronger, so that his bald pate quite scared the weak-nerved members of the company. The young housewife curtsied low in humble ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... change Of manners, and the breeding of our youth Within the kingdom, since myself was one—- When I was young, he lived not in the stews Durst have conceived a scorn, and utter'd it, On a gray head; age was authority Against a buffoon, and a man had then A certain reverence paid unto his years, That had none due unto his life: so much The sanctity of some prevail'd for others. But now we all are fallen; youth, from their fear, And age, from ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... as an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self-indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a joker ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... peoples. Why do we laugh when a man on the stage searches everywhere for his hat, which is all the time on his head? Why do we laugh when a pompous gentleman slips on a piece of orange-peel and falls to the ground, or when one buffoon unexpectedly hits another on the head, and, before he has time to recover, with equal unexpectedness hooks his legs with a stick and brings him heavily to the ground? Why did we laugh at the adventures of Mr. Penley in "Charley's Aunt"? In all of these "ludicrous" affairs there is an element ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... he was puzzled, as if this laughter disclosed something that he had never suspected in her. But then Cassandra's face caught his eye, gazing with astonishment at the buffoon, not laughing, too deeply intent and surprised to laugh at what she saw, and for some moments he watched her as if she ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... what courage!" continued the young detective. "Ah! there's no denying it, his system of defense—of absolute denial—is a masterpiece. It is perfect. How well he played that difficult part of buffoon! At times I could scarcely restrain my admiration. What is a famous comedian beside that fellow? The greatest actors need the adjunct of stage scenery to support the illusion, whereas this man, entirely unaided, almost convinced ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... like to see us, and is looking at us continually from his stronghold and yelling and scoffing at us—as they say sometimes that the Spaniards are chickens; again, that they are sibabuyes; [21] and again, that they will come to set fire to us all, and kill us. The Moro is a great rascal and buffoon. I trust in God that in a little while He will be ready for our thanksgivings [for the defeat of the Moros]. Will your Reverence urge His servants to aid us with their sacrifices and prayers. Those, I ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking, * * * * * * * He laughed himself from Court, then sought relief By forming parties, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... did not avail to procure any better usage for the unfortunate judge, whose health was suffering severely under his privations. Ivan, however, had recommended himself in the same way as Leo, by his perfections as a cook, and moreover he was a capital buffoon. His fetters were sometimes taken off that he might divert the villagers by his dances and strange antics while his master played the guitar. Sometimes they sang Russian songs together to the instrument, and on these occasions ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a silly kind of beggarly baron, who was treated as a buffoon, was invited in the year 1743 to dine with Baron Pejaczewitz, when Trenck happened to be present. The conversation happened to turn on a kind of brandy made in this country, and Trenck jocularly said he annually ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... still is the fact that magnetism is by no means confined to those who have finely trained intellects or who have achieved great reputations. Some vaudeville buffoon or some gypsy fiddler may have more attractive power than the virtuoso who had spent years in developing his mind and his technic. The average virtuoso thinks far more of his "geist," his "talent" (or as Emerson would have it, "the shadow of the soul—the otherwise") than ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... beast, seeing that no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... life's decline, Caesar persuades, submission must be mine; Him I obey, whom heaven itself obeys, Hopeless of pleasing, yet inclin'd to please. Here then at once, I welcome every shame, 15 And cancel at threescore a life of fame; No more my titles shall my children tell, The old buffoon will fit my name as well; This day beyond its term my fate extends, For life is ended ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... Hebrew, and English qualities—the faith of the Jew, the firmness of the Roman, and the homespun simplicity of the Englishman of his own age—in purpose and in powers "an armed angel on a battle-day;" in manners a plain blunt corporal; and in language always a stammerer, and sometimes a buffoon; the middle-class man of his time, with the merits and the defects of his order, but touched with an inspiration as from heaven, lifting him far above all the aristocracy, and all the royalty, and all the literature of his period; who found his one great faculty—inflamed and ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... Riots broke out in several parts of the country. At Coventry and Worcester the Roman Catholic worship was violently interrupted. [106] At Bristol the rabble, countenanced, it was said, by the magistrates, exhibited a profane and indecent pageant, in which the Virgin Mary was represented by a buffoon, and in which a mock host was carried in procession. The garrison was called out to disperse the mob. The mob, then and ever since one of the fiercest in the kingdom, resisted. Blows were exchanged, and serious hurts inflicted. [107] The agitation was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the throne his intrigue with Jane Disome was already notorious, as is proved by this extract, under date 1515, from the Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris: "About this time whilst the King was in Paris, there was a priest called Mons. Cruche, a great buffoon, who a little time before with several others had publicly performed in certain entertainments and novelties' (sic) on scaffolds upon the Place Maubert, there being in turn jest, sermon, morality and farce; and in the morality appeared ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... notwithstanding the universal notion that you sell yourself to him by giving him three drops of your blood, or by signing a compact with your blood, yet many stories of this class are evidently pre-Christian. He is generally represented as a buffoon, and easily outwitted. Further particulars respecting him will be found in the Introduction. The stories incidentally referred to in this section of our work are mostly ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be intimated to him that if he did the author of Rasselas would thrash him in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 'Did not Foote,' asked Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, sir?' and our great moralist replied, 'Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.' When he denounced Macpherson for his Ossian frauds, and the irate Celt said something about personal chastisement, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... that would be the climax: that I should show my long beard and white hairs amid that throng of women and lunatics; and clap and yell in unseemly rapture over the vile contortions of an abandoned buffoon. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... out like bats' wings from his yellow, wrinkled cheeks. He was visibly punished by his journey; the sweat streamed from his leather and under his puckered eyelids his eyes flamed imprecations. His grotesque body was enveloped in yet more grotesque apparel—the piebald of the buffoon, the mottled livery of the chartered mountebank. There was a slender collar of gold about his neck, on which those that were near enough to him and had quick sight might read in plain terms that he was a royal fool, one of those jesters whom the great loved to tend to their beck, that they might ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... was as Puritanic as Oliver Cromwell himself. For some reason he had come to the conclusion that the less the settlers knew of pleasure the better, and therefore he laid down the law that all strolling popular entertainers should be forbidden to enter the holy city. No public buffoon ever cracked his jokes at Herrnhut. No tight-rope dancer poised on giddy height. No barrel-dancer rolled his empty barrel. No tout for lotteries swindled the simple. No juggler mystified the children. No cheap-jack cheated the innocent maidens. No quack-doctor sold his nasty pills. No melancholy ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew better than ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... loyal sentiment and esprit de corps. It is interesting to observe the different views the artists have severally taken of it, for most of them in turn have attempted his portrayal. Brine regarded him as a mere buffoon, devoid of either dignity or breeding; Crowquill, as a grinning, drum-beating Showman; Doyle, Thackeray, and others adhered to the idea of the Merry, but certainly not uproarious, Hunchback; Sir John Tenniel showed him as a vivified puppet, all that was earnest, responsible, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... that the wrestlers have a fancy to be known by the names of mountains and rivers—in a fashion which recalled the tournament. There was also another personage, with a Dan Leno-like face and an extraordinary gift of contorting his legs, who played the buffoon, and gyrated round the dignified M.C., who remained unmoved while the audience laughed. It was evidently the right thing for the prizes—they were awarded at the end of each bout—to be presented as comically as possible; and some of the ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body; those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... feudal countries until well-nigh the middle of the sixteenth century; and which were succeeded by no more stories of heroes, but by the realistic comic novels of the type of "Lazarillo de Tormes," and the buffoon philosophic extravaganzas of "Gargantua." Further indeed it was impossible to go than did mediaeval idealism in the Amadises. Compared with them the most fairy-tale-like Arthurian stories are perfect ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... that the knight to whom he had surrendered was no other than the king's jester. That he, a chieftain of the Holy League, the long-descended scion of the illustrious house of Lorraine, brother of the great Duke of Mercoeur, should become the captive of a Huguenot buffoon seemed the most stinging jest yet perpetrated since fools had come in fashion. The famous Chicot—who was as fond of a battle as of a gibe, and who was almost as reckless a rider as his master—proved on this occasion that the cap and bells could cover as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... over. To the joyful surprise of the visitors, there among them was little Eva—supposed to be eaten, and she even retained her right hand. Thus another newspaper libel upon the poor old black bear—the buffoon of the forest—was shown to be devoid of truth; yet that story was published in the Toronto papers, and, no doubt, was copied all over ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... Constantly bearing this distinction in mind, we shall gain considerable insight, not only into their religion, but into seeming contradictions in their literary history. They allowed Aristophanes to picture Bacchus as a buffoon, and Hercules as a glutton, in the same age in which they persecuted Socrates for neglect of the sacred mysteries and contempt of the national gods. To that part of their religion which belonged ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... over like a tumbler, tittering, at the same time, like a human being. Swanhilda for a while kept herself quiet; but as the luminous antic ceased not practising his harlequinade, she peevishly exclaimed—'What buffoon is carrying on his fooleries here? I desire to be left in peace.' The light vanished instantly, and Swanhilda already had congratulated herself upon gaining her point, when suddenly a loud shrilly sound was heard—the floor of the apartment gave way, and from the gap ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... heaven; the priest, in his alb and chasuble, dispensing of the blessings of the Pope; the judge, in his wig and bombazine, endeavouring to reconcile divine justice with the law's mundane majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the bride and bridegroom at the altar or before the mayor putting on their already heavy-ruffled garments the sacred ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... weakness; was no prop to the "child," and believes himself absolved by this severe castigation. Qu'est-ce qu'il me chante? Has the letter undergone transformation in the Christian climate of Reinfeld, or did it leave the hand of this once shallow buffoon in its present form? He asserts, moreover, that he lives in a never dreamed of happiness with his present wife, whose acquaintance he made a week before the engagement, and whom he married six weeks after the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... a degraded priest, a short, stout little bald-headed man in a torn cassock, chanced on Ignat, and stuck to him, just as a piece of mud will stick to a shoe. An impersonal, deformed and nasty creature, he played the part of a buffoon: they smeared his bald head with mustard, made him go upon all-fours, drink mixtures of different brandies and dance comical dances; he did all this in silence, an idiotic smile on his wrinkled face, and having done what he was told to do, he invariably said, outstretching his hand with ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... of which but two or three of his works preserve even the feeblest image. In their midst Galiani, secretary of the Neapolitan Embassy, a clever dwarf; a genius, "a sort of Plato or Machiavelli with the spirit and action of a harlequin," inexhaustible in stories, an admirable buffoon, and an accomplished skeptic, "having no faith in anything, on anything or about anything,"[4206] not even in the new philosophy, braves the atheists of the drawing-room, beats down their dithyrambs with puns, and, with his perruque in his hand, sitting cross-legged on the chair on which he is ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... afraid of Marya Dmitrievna she was regarded in Petersburg as a buffoon, and so of what she had said they only noticed, and repeated in a whisper, the one coarse word she had used, supposing the whole sting of her remark to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... cloisters, parks, temples, pools, and fountains, and he should be mad enough to commit such a crime—and for a mere trifle? [Wrathfully.] You offspring of a loose wench, you brother-in-law of the king, Sansthanaka, you libertine, you slanderer, you buffoon, you gilded monkey, say it before me! This friend of mine does n't even draw a flowering jasmine creeper to himself, to gather the blossoms, for fear that a twig might perhaps be injured. How should he commit a crime like this, which heaven and earth call accursed? Just wait, you son of a bawd! Wait ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... were lawyers, observed that he had but two in his whole empire, and he believed he would hang one of them as soon as he got home. A still more striking though less ghastly freak of fancy was that perpetrated by the Empress Anne of Courland, who, on the occasion of the marriage of her favorite buffoon, Galitzin, caused a palace of ice to be built, with a bed of the same material, in which she compelled the happy pair to pass their wedding night. The Empress Catharine II., a Pomeranian by birth, but ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... bruego. Brush broso. Brutal bruta. Brute bruto. Buccaneer marrabisto. Bucket sitelo. Buckle buko. Buckler sxildo. Buckwheat poligono. Bud burgxono. Budget (finance) budgxeto. Buffalo bubalo. Buffer sxtopilo. Buffet frapi. Buffet (restaurant) bufedo. Buffoon sxercemulo. Bug cimo. Build konstrui. Building, a konstruajxo. Bulb bulbo. Bulgarian Bulgaro. Bulk dikeco. Bulky multdika. Bull bovoviro. Bullet kuglo. Bulletin noto, karteto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite book Till Eulenspiegel, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something. Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... who teach their children to behave "pretty"—thinking good and quiet synonymous. Somehow, the little fellows, unfortunately, take the Lark for Mr. Spohf, who has hitherto done the funny in a refined style, scarcely to be imagined—an elegant, amiable, fun,—a mixture of the buffoon and gentleman, the sublime and the ridiculous, quite marvellous to behold,—making our little friend (who you are aware was moulded in one of Nature's odd freaks) appear, to tender imaginations, almost ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... Comito on the stage, in the dress of a slave, with a stool on her head, was at length permitted to exercise her independent talents. She neither danced, nor sung, nor played on the flute; her skill was confined to the pantomime arts; she excelled in buffoon characters, and as often as the comedian swelled her cheeks, and complained with a ridiculous tone and gesture of the blows that were inflicted, the whole theatre of Constantinople resounded with laughter and applause. The beauty of Theodora [22] was the subject of more flattering praise, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... been regarded by some critics as a grave moral censor, veiling his high purpose behind the grinning mask of comedy; by others as a buffoon of genius, whose only object was to raise a laugh. Both sides of the question are ingeniously and copiously argued in Browning's 'Aristophanes' Apology'; and there is a judicious summing up of the case of Aristophanes vs. Euripides in Professor Jebb's lectures on Greek poetry. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... shrugged their shoulders. Jonathas, opening wide his little eyes, gave a forced, buffoon-like laugh. Nothing could be more absurd, said he, than the idea that a human body could have eternal life; and he declaimed, for the benefit of the proconsul, this ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... have you to say? What explanation have you to offer for your conduct? You have behaved like a buffoon, sir—d'you hear ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... to the excellent managers of that excellent institution, that a more worthy, modest, sober, and loyal man does not exist in his majesty's dominions than this distinguished poet, whom some of his waggish friends have taken up the absurd fancy of exhibiting in print as a sort of boozing buffoon; and who is now, instead of revelling in the license of tavern-suppers and party politics, bearing up, as he may, against severe and unmerited misfortunes, in as dreary a solitude as ever nursed the melancholy of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... could write that was in many ways a mere buffoon, who praised his wares with the vulgar glibness of a quack. He was vain and ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... tumbler; those who are delicate need not read it; those who are indelicate won't be the worse of it."—"But," persists Conshy—"I have other hairs in your neck, Master Tommy—you are growing a bit of a buffoon on us, and sorry am I to say it, sometimes not altogether, as a man with a rank imagination may construe you, a very decent one. Now, my good boy, I would have you to remember that what you write is ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... appearance and manner, suggest a very singular individuality. There was evidently something peculiar about his face; he was undoubtedly witty and worldly-wise, a braggart, a sycophant, and somewhat of a buffoon. He was imbued with an exaggerated idea of his own importance, and possessed of most unblushing assurance. In 1591 he signed his address "To the Reader," prefixed to his Second Fruites, "Resolute John Florio," ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... disguise is so perfect, or rather, the new character, in which you this time appear, has been so well acted, that had it not been the afternoon you set for your third appearance, I should have never known you. I think you make a better Quaker boy than you did a crazy man last time, or buffoon and tumbler the first one. But what have you ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... not an exhibition of love—or, at least, not necessarily so. You might exhibit sensibility before a famous poet, or a gallant soldier, or a celebrated traveler—or, for that matter, before a remarkable buffoon, like Cagliostro, or a freak, like ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... restoration, he was of course neglected by the fiddling, gambling, wenching, royal buffoon, who succeeded the royal martyr, and whose necessities he had supplied, when an outcast pauper exile in a foreign land, from the proceeds of those very estates which he had so nearly lost in fighting ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... was of old to Jove, The same a Harlequin is now; The former was buffoon above, The latter is ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... that accounted not a little for his successful amours; since women, for the most part frivolous creatures, are excessively bored by the seriousness with which men treat them, and they can seldom resist the buffoon who makes them laugh. Their sense of humour is crude. Diana of Ephesus is always prepared to fling prudence to the winds for the red-nosed comedian who sits on his hat. I realised that Captain Butler had charm. If I had not known the tragic story of the shipwreck ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... servants and suite of Mamelukes leaving the Caliph marvelling at this and saying to Ja'afar, "Sawest thou Khalif, with his mule and dress, his white slaves and his dignity? But yesterday I knew him for a buffoon and a jester." And they marvelled at this much. Then they mounted and rode, till they drew near Khalif's house, when the Fisherman alighted and, taking a bundle from one of his attendants, opened it and pulled out therefrom a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... it was a bone. Gnashing his teeth, he tried to carry the eternal subtleties by violence. As a man he often bored her, for he was always saying and doing the same things. But as a philosopher he really was a joy for ever, an inexhaustible buffoon. Taking up her pen, she began to caricature him. She drew a rabbit-warren where rabbits were at play in four dimensions. Before she had introduced the principal figure, she was interrupted by the footman. He ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... the saints in Caesar's household may teach us! Think of the abyss of lust and murder there, of the Emperor by turns a buffoon, a sensualist, and a murderer. A strange place to find saints in that sty of filth! Let no man say that it is impossible for a pure life to be lived in any circumstances, or try to bribe his conscience by insisting on the difficulties of his environment. It may be our duty to stand at our post ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the finest. His every production is bathed in humour. This must never be, though it often has been, forgotten. He is not to be taken literally. He is always a humourist, not unfrequently a writer of burlesque, and occasionally a buffoon. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... say—"I would you had him closely watched. For he is a general disliker of us and of our doings; he is gathering together an enormous treasure, and he makes an open jest of our literary pursuits. You, for instance, he calls a philosophizing old woman, and me a dissolute buffoon and scamp. Consider what you would have done. For my part, I bear the fellow no ill will; but again, I say, take care that he does not do a mischief to yourself, or ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... stood and gaped at her. Underground politician that he was, he knew that Mirabelle had utterly destroyed the half of his ambition. She had made him a laughing-stock, a buffoon, a political joke. To think that his name was connected with a crusade against short-skirts and dancing—Ugh! Not even the average run of church-goers would swallow it. "Mayor!" he thought bitterly. "President of Council! I couldn't get elected second ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... wits went starring among the despotic courts of Lombardy and Romagna, and found themselves much better rewarded than at home, where their talent was cheap and plentiful. The better type of these people is the amusing man (l'uomo piacevole), the worse is the buffoon and the vulgar parasite who presents himself at weddings and banquets with the argument, 'If I am not invited, the fault is not mine.' Now and then the latter combine to pluck a young spendthrift, but in general they are treated and despised as parasites, while wits of higher position ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... out, And like the crawling ivy round a tree That licks the bark to gain the trunk's support, Climb high by creeping ruse instead of force? No, grammercy! What! I, like all the rest Dedicate verse to bankers?—play buffoon In cringing hope to see, at last, a smile Not disapproving, on a patron's lips? Grammercy, no! What! learn to swallow toads? —With frame aweary climbing stairs?—a skin Grown grimed and horny,—here, about the knees? And, acrobat-like, teach my back to bend?— No, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... curious spectators in the church at Ars was a highly educated freethinker, a mocker at religion, of the Voltaire stamp. To please his wife he had accompanied her to Ars, in order, as he expressed it, to have a look at "the old buffoon." With a scornful air he surveyed the crowd praying devoutly in the little church. Suddenly the cure stepped out of the confessional, advanced towards the new arrival, and, with an imposing movement of the hand, requested him to ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... was a daring one, in view of Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne, a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a place betrays in Scott's eminently sane and balanced mind a curious strain of impracticality, to say the ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... new actor had already attained middle age,—that he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,—that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... alike! They dare not stand the test of argument; they know their weakness, and try to turn it off with a jest. Full of vanity and boasting, they venture not to examine even themselves. They philosophers, indeed! worthy disciples of Democritus; who DID nothing but laugh, and WAS nothing but a buffoon. I am rightly served, however, for beginning a correspondence like this; and still more ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for word, that Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, not yet with pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to draw the ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... drawn a juster picture of Caesar; and if he had read Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles. He complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and that in "Coriolanus"—a play which Dennis "improved" for the new stage—he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a most undignified fashion.[14] Gildon, again, says that Shakspere must have read Sidney's "Defence of Posey" and therefore, ought to have known the rules and that his neglect ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... (422) Owen MacSwinny, a buffoon; formerly director of the playhouse. [He had been a manager of Drury Lane Theatre, and was the author of several dramatic pieces. He resided in Italy for several years, and, on his return, was appointed keeper of the King's Mews. He died in 1754, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... gateway and along the marble walk which led to the rear. Up the winding steps to the front entrance, where swung the marvelous bronze doors which had stirred the imaginations of two continents, streamed the favored of the fashionable world. Among them Carmen saw many whom she recognized. The buffoon, Larry Beers, was there, swinging jauntily along with the bejeweled wife of Samson, the multimillionaire packer. Kane and his wife, and Weston followed. Outside the gates there was incessant chugging of automobiles, mingled with the shouted orders of the three policemen detailed ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the 8th from London. Doth the post dabble into our letters? Whatever agreement you make with Murray, if satisfactory to you, must be so to me. There need be no scruple, because, though I used sometimes to buffoon to myself, loving a quibble as well as the barbarian himself (Shakspeare, to wit)—'that, like a Spartan, I would sell my life as dearly as possible'—it never was my intention to turn it to personal, pecuniary account, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... satisfaction at the hut, Wolsey bade Patch dismount, and ascertain whether Mabel was within. The buffoon obeyed, tried the door, and finding it fastened, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... is no better test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars, served no doubt to colour all who had opposed him with a blacker shade than ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... persons and of a man full of ulcers, and yet are delighted to be spectators of the Philoctetes of Aristophon and the Jocasta of Silanion, wherein such wasting and dying persons are well acted; so must the young scholar, when he reads in a poem of Thersites the buffoon or Sisyphus the whoremaster or Batrachus the bawd speaking or doing anything, so praise the artificial managery of the poet, adapting the expressions to the persons, as withal to look on the discourses and actions so expressed as odious ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the obsequious Sampson. 'His acquaintance with Natural History too is surprising. Quite a Buffoon, quite!' ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... felt I owe Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that, in the midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter? ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... they could no longer partake the danger and glory of the field. This entertainment, which might be considered as a school of military virtue, was succeeded by a farce, that debased the dignity of human nature. A Moorish and a Scythian buffoon successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators, by their deformed figure, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd speeches, and the strange, unintelligible confusion of the Latin, the Gothic, and the Hunnic languages; and the hall resounded ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... dare say it is very funny, and anybody can laugh like a buffoon about such an arrangement; but how are they going to be safe on board a vessel whose officers cannot ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... hated Tigellius, the flattering musical buffoon so well described by Horace, thus lashes his country in a letter to Fabius Gallus: ‘Id ego in lucris pono non ferre hominem pestilentiorem putriâ suâ.’ Again, writing to his brother: ‘Remember,’ says he, ‘though in perfect health, you are in Sardinia.’ And Pausanias, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... be first, even aboard a rover; but my birth is every whit as good as any Scottish lord's, and I am not ashamed to confess that I stayed Crowding Pat until the end, and was not much better than the crew's buffoon. Indeed, it was no scene to bring out my merits. My health suffered from a variety of reasons; I was more at home to the last on a horse's back than a ship's deck; and, to be ingenuous, the fear of the sea was constantly in my mind, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plot, by leaving out the intrigues of the Grecian chiefs, and limiting the interest to the amours of Troilus and Cressida. But he could not be insensible to the merit of this scene, though he has supplied it by one far inferior, in which Ulysses is introduced, using gross flattery to the buffoon Thersites. In the latter part of the play, Dryden has successfully exerted his own inventive powers. The quarrelling scene between Hector and Troilus is very impressive, and no bad imitation of that betwixt Brutus and Cassius, with which Dryden seems to have been so much charmed, and which he ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Johnson said, 'He is not a good mimick.' One of the company added, 'A merry Andrew, a buffoon.' JOHNSON. 'But he has wit too, and is not deficient in ideas, or in fertility and variety of imagery, and not empty of reading; he has knowledge enough to fill up his part. One species of wit he has in an eminent degree, that of escape. You drive him into a corner with both hands; but he's gone, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... England—no one I suppose in Europe—wanted to make jokes during that critical week which followed my interview with Ascher. The most abandoned buffoon shrank from jesting when every morning brought a fresh declaration of war by one great power on another. But even under such circumstances the sense of the ridiculous survives—a thing to be carefully concealed—in those who are fortunate enough to possess ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... who had curried favour with Nero. Polyclitus was sent to inquire into Suetonius Paulinus' administration of Britain after the revolt of Boadicea in A.D. 61. Vatinius was a deformed cobbler from Beneventum who became a sort of court buffoon, and acquired ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... more at his ease, without ceasing to indulge in his little laugh, whilst continuing his perambulation about the room. "You may be right. God has given me a face which only arouses comical thoughts in others. I'm a buffoon. But excuse an old man's cackle. You, Rodion Romanovitch, you are in your prime, and, like all young people, you appreciate, above all things, human intelligence. Intellectual smartness and abstract rational deductions ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... and which was governed by laws framed by himself. Aristippus and Epicurus were in the highest esteem here as the most polite, benevolent, and convivial of men. Even AEsop the Phrygian was here, whom they made use of by way of buffoon. Diogenes of Sinope had so wonderfully changed his manners in this place, that he married Lais the harlot, danced and sang, got drunk, and played a thousand freaks. Not one Stoic did I see amongst them; they, it seems, were not yet got up to the top of the high hill {124a} of virtue; and as to ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... man's acquaintance whatsoever a condescension, nor accept it from the greatest upon unworthy or ignominious terms. I know a certain lord that has often invited a set of people, and proposed for their diversion a buffoon player, and an eminent poet, to be of the party; and which was yet worse, thought them both sufficiently recompensed by the dinner, and the honour of his company. This kind of insolence is risen to such a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... accordingly, exclaiming as he departed—"Oh, city and court! you by whom the expectations of the bold pretender are fulfilled, while the hopes of the modest labourer are destroyed; you who abundantly sustain the shameless Buffoon, while the worthy sage is left to die of hunger; I bid you farewell." That said, he proceeded to Flanders, where he finished in arms the life which he might have rendered immortal by letters, and died in the company of his friend the Captain Don Diego, leaving behind him the reputation ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Which of the six is the real man?—that's the question that torments me. One of them is a hero, another a buffoon, another a humbug, another perhaps a bit of a blackguard. (He pauses and looks furtively at Louka, as he adds with deep bitterness) And one, at least, is a coward—jealous, like all cowards. (He goes to the ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... the metal of his own mind would never have found by reason of its own gravitating power. He courted notoriety in a way that would have made him, if a poorer man, the toadying Boswell of some other Johnson giant, and, if very poor, the welcome buffoon of some gossiping journal, who would never weary of contortions, and who would brutify himself at the death, to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... always a buffoon," he cried. "What do you mean, you numskull, by saying that they are Prussians? How could Prussians be coming from the direction of France? You have lost any wits ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one of his confessions to Talleyrand: he crudely points out in himself the distance between natural instinct and studied courage.—Here and elsewhere, we obtain a glimpse of the actor and even of the Italian buffoon; M. de Pradt called him "Jupiter Scapin." Read his reflections before M. de Pradt, on his return from Russia, in which he appears in the light of a comedian who, having played badly and failed in his part, retires behind the scenes, runs down the piece, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... were two serious old men; one was a model, a native of Frascati, with the face of a venerable apostle; the other, for contrast, looked like a buffoon and was the possessor of a grotesque nose, long, thin at the end and adorned ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... Bactrus and the Dajlah and the Euphrates and the river of Basrah and the stream of Antioch and the Orontees and the Nile of Egypt and the Salt Sea and the ebb and the flow of the Ocean, I will not let thee taste a morsel. But, said the buffoon, if thou wish to eat of chicken and white bread and lamb and sweets and mutton patties, go thou to the house of Ja'afar son of Yahya the Barmeky, who hath received hospitality from a Damascus man named Attaf. He bestoweth charity in honour of him in this manner, and he neither getteth ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... play the part of a clown or buffoon, acting in a very silly and stupid manner, while the others looked on laughing and pointing their ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... throwing the burning stump of his cigar over the gunwale, "that the experiences of the past year have not been all an excursion into the 'Arabian Nights'? If it were not for that fine marble relief in my trunk which I bought of that miserable buffoon in the Via Sistina, I should easily persuade myself that the actual world were bounded on the east by the Atlantic and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. I was just considering whether I should try to smuggle it through the custom-house, or whether, perhaps, it would be wiser to ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... conquerors. The frightful old Paris of Francois Villon, with all its bleak show of famine and death, had its constant changes of slang. "Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant," says the burglar-poet, and he means that the old buffoon is tiresome; the young man with the newest phases of city slang at his tongue's end is most acceptable in merry company. Very few people can read Villon's longer poems at all, for they are almost entirely written in cant language, and the glossary must be in constant requisition. The rascal is a ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Congressional service became an auditor, and was known as "the Watch Dog of the Treasury." Tom Corwin, of the same State, with a portly figure, swarthy complexion, and wonderful facial expression, and an inexhaustible flow of wit, who was not a buffoon, but a gentleman whose humor was natural, racy, and chaste. Gulian C. Verplanck and Thomas J. Oakley, two members of the New York bar, who represented that city, were statesmen rather than politicians. John Chambers, of Kentucky, a gigantic economist, was ever ready to reform ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... determined to prove its truth. Disguised as a clown, he attended the fancy-dress ball, and in the character of a mountebank collected a group of ladies and gentlemen around him while he related with the inimitable skill of a buffoon a romantic narrative. To most of the people present it was simply an amusing story, but to the count and Lagors and Madame Fauvel, who were among the listeners, it seemed something much more, for Lecoq dressed out his theory of the robbery in the trappings of romance. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... among the reformers, chief among whom was Calvin. His intimacy with Calvin led the more radical reformers to be suspicious of him, and not without reason. Walter Besant tells us that, "One hears he is a buffoon—he is always mocking and always laughing. That is perfectly true. He laughs at the pretensions of pope, cardinal, bishop, and priest; he laughs at monkery and monks; he mocks at the perpetual iteration of litanies; he laughs ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Cicero says, absolutely odious, utter disgust being excited by his drinking bouts at all hours, his wild expenses, his gross amours, the day spent in sleeping or walking off his debauches, and the night in banquets and at theaters, and in celebrating the nuptials of some comedian or buffoon. It is related that, drinking all night at the wedding of Hippias, the comedian, on the morning, having to harangue the people, he came forward, overcharged as he was, and vomited before them all, one of his friends holding his gown for him. Sergius, the player, was one of the friends ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... while the assaults upon the governing classes generally stirred his wrath. The satire upon individuals may be all very well in its place, but a man, he said, has no business to set up as the 'regenerator of society' because he is its most 'distinguished buffoon.' He was not picking his words, and 'buffoon' is certainly an injudicious phrase; but the sentiment which it expressed was so characteristic and deeply rooted that I must dwell a little upon its manifestation at ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... exhausted words throw into relief. Rhetoric is content to borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same phrase; and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some modem writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying his text ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... judgments, as to invent or make, His sharpness,—-that is most excusable; As being forced out of a suffering virtue, Oppressed with the license of the time:—- And howsoever fools or jerking pedants, Players, or suchlike buffoon barking wits, May with their beggarly and barren trash Tickle base vulgar ears, in their despite; This, like Jove's thunder, shall their pride control, "The honest ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... "Oh, you Neka" (buffoon), she groaned, "didn't you swear to separate from Nalini, and have you not taken all your meals with him ever since? Is that the action of ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... developing his true character of brute and buffoon, gathering around him the lowest profligates, and reveling in the most debasing and vulgar vices, Catharine, though guilty and unhappy, was holding her court with dignity and affability, which charmed all who ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fantasy, and incident. Nor is it always solemn and high-pitched. Its gravity is relieved from time to time with the ridiculous figure or character, the ludicrous incident, the jests and antics of the buffoon. It has been said that Spenser never smiles. He not only smiles, with amusement or sly irony; he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote, and meant us to laugh at. He did not describe with ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... common sort of individual," he said of himself, as he looked in the glass when Mary Lawrie had been already twelve months in the house; "but then a man ought to be common. A man who is uncommon is either a dandy or a buffoon." ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead, and the new one not appointed yet—but the masquing goes on the same.' ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... stomachs, is indeed odious and despicable folly, to be cast out with loathing, to be trodden under foot with contempt. If a man offends in this sort, to please himself, 'tis scurvy malignity; if to delight others, 'tis base servility and flattery: upon the first score he is a buffoon to himself; upon the last, a fool to others. And well in common speech are such practisers so termed, the grounds of that practice being so vain, and the effect so unhappy. The heart of fools, saith the ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... valet, avvocato, and gondolier, held their way alike to the common centre of amusement. The hurried air and careless eye; the measured step and jealous glance; the jest and laugh; the song of the cantatrice, and the melody of the flute; the grimace of the buffoon, and the tragic frown of the improvisatore; the pyramid of the grotesque, the compelled and melancholy smile of the harpist, cries of water-sellers, cowls of monks, plumage of warriors, hum of voices, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the courage to follow his example, to imitate him in his daring personalities, or to adopt his merciless satyrical style. They followed his steps, only in his feeble, pitiful paths, and contented themselves with writing contemptible buffoon caricature parodies of the writings of the greatest men. The new comedy never could have raised its head, had the middle comedy continued to be supported by a succession of such wits as Aristophanes, with new supplies of envenomed personal satire. Fortunately, however, the stage was pretty ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... bother her. She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why should he pick me for a bad influence...? ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... is pleasant in the way of relaxation or amusement: The mean state shall be called Easy-pleasantry, and the character accordingly a man of Easy-pleasantry; the excess Buffoonery, and the man a Buffoon; the man deficient herein a ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... undeniably poetical element in the American character. Shallow-minded people fancy Puritanism to be prosaic, because the laces and ruffles of the Cavaliers are a more picturesque costume at a masked ball than the dress of the Roundheads. The Puritan has become a grim and ugly scarecrow, on whom every buffoon may break his jest. But the genuine old Puritan spirit ceases to be picturesque only because of its sublimity: its poetry is sublimed into religion. The great poet of the Puritans fails, as far as he fails, when he tries to transcend the limits of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... heart, His comprehensive head! all interests weighed, All Europe saved, yet Britain not betrayed. He thanks you not, his pride is in piquet, Newmarket-fame, and judgment at a bet. What made (say Montagne, or more sage Charron) Otho a warrior, Cromwell a buffoon? A perjured prince a leaden saint revere, A godless regent tremble at a star? The throne a bigot keep, a genius quit, Faithless through piety, and duped through wit? Europe a woman, child, or dotard rule, And just her wisest monarch made a fool? Know, God and Nature only are ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... rough place in his official intercourse with a funny story fitting the case in point, and they called him a trifler. He would round off a logical argument with a familiar example, hitting the nail squarely on the head and driving it home, and they called him a buffoon. Big wigs and little wigs were agreed that he lowered the dignity of debate; as if debates were intended to mystify, and not to clarify truth. Yet he went on and on, and never backward, until his time was come, when his genius, fully developed, rose to the great ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... the many songs in this Interlude call for notice. The practice of introducing lyrics was in vogue long before the playwrights of Shakespeare's time displayed their use so perfectly. From this point onwards the drama rings with the rough drinking songs, pious hymns, and sweet lyrics of the buffoon, the preacher, and the lover. Thus, turning haphazard to The Trial of Treasure, the Interlude immediately preceding Like Will to Like in the volume of Dodsley's Old English Plays, we find no less than eight songs. Like Will to Like has also eight. New Custom, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... August. p. 135. I have softened some of the most improbable circumstances of this wretched biographer. From his ill-worded narration, it should seem that the prince's buffoon having accidentally entered the tent, and awakened the slumbering monarch, the fear of punishment urged him to persuade the disaffected soldiers to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... position thereby: it was not from pure love of Henrietta that she had been so importunate. In the second carriage sat the baron and Margari. Margari was just the sort of man the baron wanted. He was a scholar who could be converted into a domestic buffoon whenever one was required. Now-a-days it is difficult to catch such specimens, all our servants have become so stuck-up. Henrietta did not dare to ask how far they were going, or where they were to pass the night, she felt so strange amidst her new ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... what has Sapient Man done To justify his advent? Take him now, Apart from retrospection prehistoric, What is the being of the lifted brow Doing at present? Strange phantasmagoric Pictures of his proceedings flit before The vision of alert imagination; Playing the brute, buffoon, "bounder," or bore, In every climate, and in every nation! Homo—here wasting half his hard-earned gains Upon Leviathan Fleets and Mammoth Armies, Spending his boasted gifts of Tongue and Brains In Party spouting. Swearing potent charm is In grubbing muck-rake Money on the Mart, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... old and honoured jest that Eve—type of eternal womanhood—sacrificed the peace of Eden for the pleasures of dress. We see this jest reflected in the satire of the Middle Ages, in the bitter gibes of mummer and buffoon. We can hear its echoes in the invectives of the reformer,—"I doubt," said a good fifteenth-century bishop to the ladies of England in their horned caps,—"I doubt the Devil sit not between those horns." We find it illustrated with admirable naivete in the tapestries ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... much bon ton to act a comedy that even men of gravity, even the first magistrate of Paris, could so much forget the dignity of position as to commit to memory and even to act some of the parts of a buffoon. [Footnote: Montjoie, "Histoire de ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... to Buffoon's tables, and those of Parcieux and others, all of which were based on the aggregate of all classes and conditions. Those who made the estimate, however, forgot the dangers of infancy, indulged in general calculations, and the ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... fellow dressed like a buffoon, with the parrot on his wrist,—for what purpose is he introduced into ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... that he ordered his own historian to write it down with all its circumstances. Then addressing himself to the audience; "Did you ever hear," said he, "such a surprising event as has happened on the account of my little crooked buffoon?" The Christian merchant, after falling down, and touching the earth with his forehead, spoke as follows: "Most puissant monarch, I know a story yet more astonishing than this; if your majesty will give me leave, I will ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... not many days, that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank from my Lady's keeping-room to the antechamber, and thence to the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... fellow, and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man. Indiscriminate familiarity either offends your superiors, or else dubs you their dependent and led captain. It gives your inferiors just, but troublesome and improper claims to equality. A joker is near a-kin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... caused Poinsinet to be fully convinced of his ugliness; he used to go about in companies, and take every opportunity of inveighing against himself; he made verses and epigrams against himself; he talked about "that dwarf, Poinsinet;" "that buffoon, Poinsinet;" "that conceited, hump-backed Poinsinet;" and he would spend hours before the glass, abusing his own face as he saw it reflected there, and vowing that he grew handsomer at every fresh epithet ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... terms with him, and it will probably end in his recovering the Great Seal. When this is done they will have consummated their disgrace. Sheil said, 'The difficulty is how to deal with a bully and a buffoon,' and as they have succumbed to and bargained with the one, now they are going to truckle to the other; there is not one of them who has scrupled to express his opinion of Brougham, but let us see if he really does come in or much indignation may be thrown away. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... moody. He had been to more theatres for relaxation. The whole house was roaring with laughter and applause, and he saw only an ignoble farce that made him sad. It would have damped the spirits of the buffoon on the stage to have seen Pen's dismal face. He hardly knew what was happening; the scene and the drama passed before him like a dream or a fever. Then he thought he would go to the Back Kitchen, his old haunt with Warrington—he ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... recompensed: and why? Because Taste (GOUT, inclination) sets no limits to its recompenses. The King of Prussia overloads men of talent with his benefits for precisely the reasons which induce a little German Prince to overload with benefits a buffoon or a dwarf." [—OEuvres de Voltaire,—xxvii. 220 n.] Could there be a phenomenon more indisputably of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... considerable person as you find him here, who was indeed for his senseless humour of designing to govern—us'd no otherwise than as the Buffoon of the Family—takes upon him to call Don Quixot (whom the Authour imbellishes, with all manner of learning and good sense, bating his whimsical Chimaera of Knight Errantry,) Goodman Dulpate and Don Coxcomb. Well, however the Switcher here has escap'd for his usage of a Gentleman in or near ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... can induce you to hesitate?" said Boileau, charged by the Academicians with the negotiation. "A point of honor," replied Moliere. "Now," answered his friend, "what honor can lie in blacking your face with mustachios and assuming the burlesque disguise of a buffoon, in order to be cudgelled on a public stage?" "The point of honor," answered Moliere, "consists in my not deserting more than a hundred persons, whom my personal exertions are necessary to support." The ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the dark, humorous eyes, that seemed almost too tolerant of his grievance. He had been to levees, and his heart had sunk equally before the vulgar crowd, who seemed to regard this man as their own buffoon, and the pompousness of position, learning and dignity, which he seemed to delight ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... coition, came now to beset me. The persons of these dreams were (and still are) invariably women, with this one remembered exception: I dreamed that Oscar Wilde, one of my photographs of him incarnate, approached me with a buffoon languishment and perpetrated fellatio, an act verbally expounded shortly before by my oracle. For a month or more, recalling this dream ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... same subjects that are still treated every day on the boards at Naples; the same rough daubs, half improvised on the spur of the moment; the same frankly coarse and indecent gayety. The Odeon where we are now, was the Pompeian San Carlino. Bucco, the stupid and mocking buffoon; the dotard Pappus, who reminds us of the Venetian Pantaloon; Mandacus, who is the Neapolitan Guappo; the Oscan Casnar, a first edition of Cassandra; and finally, Maccus, the king of the company, the Punchinello who still survives and flourishes,—such ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... with an almost passionate disdain. She was suddenly aware of an intense burning misery that seemed to gnaw into her very soul. Why had she come out with this buffoon, she wondered? Why had she come to the masquerade at all? She was utterly out of sympathy with its festive gaiety. A great and overmastering desire for solitude descended upon her. She turned ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... Grounds etc., 1672; Hieragonisticon, or Corah's Doom, being an Answer to, etc., 1672; An Answer to two Letters of T.B., etc., 1673. The occasional references to it in the theological literature of these times are indeed innumerable. Many affected to treat him as a mere buffoon—the concoctor, as one bitterly put it, of 'a pretty fardle of tales bundled together, and they have had the hap to fall into such hands as had rather lose a friend, not to say their country, than a jest.' Anthony Wood, writing at the time of its appearance, classes it with 'the fooleries, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... the secrets of his heart; In mischief mighty, tho' but mean of size, And like the Tempter, ever in disguise. See him, with aspect grave and gentle tread, By slow degrees approach the sickly bed; Then at his Club behold him alter'd soon— The solemn doctor turns a low Buffoon, And he, who lately in a learned freak Poach'd every Lexicon and publish'd Greek, Still madly emulous of vulgar praise, From Punch's ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... success, or in the pleasure we feel in superiority. The desire for this refined modification of sympathy, may be the motive of good and great actions; but it cannot be trusted as a moral principle. Nero's love of sympathy, made him anxious to be applauded on the stage as a fiddler and a buffoon. Tiberius banished one of his philosophic courtiers, and persecuted him till the unfortunate man laid violent hands upon himself, merely because he had discovered that the emperour read books in the morning to prepare himself ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... be wife to no buffoon; to no clumsy old clown; to no debauched, degraded parody of a man. And as for thy other rash threat, thou hast not the guts to put thy wishes into deeds, thou craven coward, for well ye know that Simon de Montfort would cut out thy foul heart with his own hand if he ever suspected thou wert ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... turned his head gently aside as if asleep; but when one of his slaves came up to the table and stole some wine, his eyes were wide open enough, and he said, 'Villain, don't you know that I am asleep only for Maecenas?'[107] But this is not perhaps so strange, considering Galba was a buffoon. But at Argos Nicostratus and Phayllus were great political rivals: so when King Philip visited that city, Phayllus thought if he prostituted his wife, who was very handsome, to the King, he would get from him some important office or place. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man. Indiscriminate familiarity either offends your superiors, or else dubbs you their dependent and led captain. It gives your inferiors just, but troublesome and improper claims of equality. A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit. Whoever is admitted or sought for, in company, upon any other account than that of his merit and manners, is never respected there, but only made use of. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... city. The colloquy had occupied some moments, but when Renwick came to a straight reach of road which led toward the tobacco factory buildings he was surprised to find that Herr Linke was nowhere in sight. The man was an enigma, a curious mixture of desperado and buffoon, but his sudden disappearance without a word of thanks, apology or explanation, gave Renwick something to puzzle over as he made his way to the bridge. Its possible significance escaped him until he had reached the river, when, a thought suddenly ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... here, in order to explain the success of Croustillac, that at sea the hours seem very long; the slightest distractions are precious, and one is very glad to have always at one's beck and call a species of buffoon endowed with imperturbable good humor. As to the chevalier, he hid under a laughing and careless mask, a sad preoccupation; the end of his journey drew near; the words of Father Griffen had been too sensible, too sincere, too just not to strongly impress our adventurer, ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... to the censure of criticks, who form their judgments upon narrower principles. Dennis and Rhymer think his Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire censures his kings as not completely royal. Dennis is offended, that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish Usurper is represented as a drunkard. But Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident; and if he preserves the essential character, is not very careful of distinctions superinduced and adventitious. His story ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... at dinner, and my father opened and read it, and then he said to my mother: 'Your brother is dying.' She grew very pale. My uncle was scarcely ever mentioned in the house, and I did not know him at all; all I knew from public talk was, that he had led, and was still leading, the life of a buffoon. After having spent his fortune with an incalculable number of women, he had only retained two mistresses, with whom he was living in small apartments in the Rue ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... traditions. Compare them with the men of to-day, with your Rafael Molina, who allows himself to be gored, playing with a heifer; with your frivolous boys like Frascuelo. I have seen the ring convulsed with laughter as that buffoon strutted across the arena, flirting his muleta as a manola does her skirts, the bewildered bull not knowing what to make of it. It was enough to make Illo turn in his ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... capers about on a fiery horse, why he has a staff of aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals and admirals, doctors and commissariat officers, and they submit to be patronised by him. Half-priest, half-buffoon, something of a Friar Tuck and something of a Louis XV. abbe, he is a sort of privileged person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in love with a curate and a cavalry ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the most respectable people of the town and neighbourhood, he placed Cortes on his right hand, on purpose to shew respect to the person he had chosen for an expedition of such high importance. There was at this time one Cervantes at St Jago, a kind of buffoon, generally called mad Cervantes, who used to assume great liberty of speech under pretence of idiocy. This man ran before the governor all the road to church, shouting out many absurdities, saying among others, "Huzza for my master Don Diego, who will soon lose his fleet, and huzza ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... was the chief object of those employed at the assemblies of the rich Egyptians; and the ridiculous gestures of the buffoon were permitted there, so long as they did not transgress the rules of decency and moderation. Music was always indispensable, whether at the festive meetings of the rich or poor; and they danced to the sound of the harp, lyre, guitar, pipe, tambourine, and other instruments, and, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... stream of sorry thought went rushing through me as I sat with an empty jug in my hand in a room that was sounding like a market-place. With a start I wakened up to find the landlord making a buffoon's attempt at a dance in the middle of the floor to the tune of the Jew-trump, a transparent trick to restore the good-humour of his roysterers, and the black man who had fetched the spae-wife was standing at my side surveying me closely out of the corners ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body; those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... least, robbed of their shame, when such was the character of the conqueror; and the claim once allowed was no longer questioned. Very different was the case, when the emperor was a fidler, or a buffoon, the senators puppets, and the pro- consuls ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts, and the effects of publick resentment, but has been caressed and patronised ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... had always in his service the Hula, who, like the buffoon or jester of the French kings, must amuse his majesty by mimicry or dancing. The Kahu alii, or Kaukaualii, as they are now styled, are attendants or followers of the high chiefs by right of birth. They accompany their masters everywhere, ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... Tigellius, the flattering musical buffoon so well described by Horace, thus lashes his country in a letter to Fabius Gallus: ‘Id ego in lucris pono non ferre hominem pestilentiorem putriâ suâ.’ Again, writing to his brother: ‘Remember,’ says ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... meetings. The Count was as Puritanic as Oliver Cromwell himself. For some reason he had come to the conclusion that the less the settlers knew of pleasure the better, and therefore he laid down the law that all strolling popular entertainers should be forbidden to enter the holy city. No public buffoon ever cracked his jokes at Herrnhut. No tight-rope dancer poised on giddy height. No barrel-dancer rolled his empty barrel. No tout for lotteries swindled the simple. No juggler mystified the children. No cheap-jack cheated the innocent maidens. No quack-doctor sold ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... vivid psychological penetration, an almost profound sense of the ridiculous, joyous fooling; above all, that first essential of satire, to be himself amused by what he wrote to amuse others; all these he possessed in a high degree. Rabelais has been called the Homeric buffoon, Lucian is ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Applause which ought to be measured out with scrupulous justice, correctness and precision, has been by admiring ignorance, poured forth in a torrent roar of uncouth and obstreperous glee on the buffoon, "the clown that says more than is set down for him," and on "the robustious perriwig-pated fellow, who tears a passion all to rags," while chaste merit and propriety have often gone ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... of mountains and rivers—in a fashion which recalled the tournament. There was also another personage, with a Dan Leno-like face and an extraordinary gift of contorting his legs, who played the buffoon, and gyrated round the dignified M.C., who remained unmoved while the audience laughed. It was evidently the right thing for the prizes—they were awarded at the end of each bout—to be presented as comically as ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... your head for it. No, my boy, to steal is abominable! That's an old trick, we'll have to give it up! But, you see, hunger isn't a kind old aunty, and you have to do something! I began to go about the town as a buffoon, to get money, a kopek at a time, to make a fool of myself, to tell funny stories, and play all sorts of tricks. Often you shiver from early morn till night in the town streets; you hide somewhere behind the corner away from people, and wait ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... and gaped at her. Underground politician that he was, he knew that Mirabelle had utterly destroyed the half of his ambition. She had made him a laughing-stock, a buffoon, a political joke. To think that his name was connected with a crusade against short-skirts and dancing—Ugh! Not even the average run of church-goers would swallow it. "Mayor!" he thought bitterly. "President of Council! I couldn't get elected ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... he will never be other than the man who intoxicated his soldiers, not with glory, like the first Napoleon, but with wine; he will never be other than the pygmy tyrant of a great people. Grandeur, even in infamy, is utterly inconsistent with the calibre of the man. As dictator, he is a buffoon; let him make himself emperor, he will be grotesque. That will finish him. His destiny is to make mankind shrug their shoulders. Will he be less severely punished for that reason? Not at all. Contempt does not, in his case, mitigate anger; he will be hideous, and he will remain ridiculous. ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... among the curious spectators in the church at Ars was a highly educated freethinker, a mocker at religion, of the Voltaire stamp. To please his wife he had accompanied her to Ars, in order, as he expressed it, to have a look at "the old buffoon." With a scornful air he surveyed the crowd praying devoutly in the little church. Suddenly the cure stepped out of the confessional, advanced towards the new arrival, and, with an imposing movement of the hand, requested him ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... as to invent or make, His sharpness,—-that is most excusable; As being forced out of a suffering virtue, Oppressed with the license of the time:—- And howsoever fools or jerking pedants, Players, or suchlike buffoon barking wits, May with their beggarly and barren trash Tickle base vulgar ears, in their despite; This, like Jove's thunder, shall their pride control, "The honest satire ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... mounted his mule and rode off, attended by his servants and suite of Mamelukes leaving the Caliph marvelling at this and saying to Ja'afar, "Sawest thou Khalif, with his mule and dress, his white slaves and his dignity? But yesterday I knew him for a buffoon and a jester." And they marvelled at this much. Then they mounted and rode, till they drew near Khalif's house, when the Fisherman alighted and, taking a bundle from one of his attendants, opened it and pulled out therefrom a piece of tabby silk[FN297] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... the street to the station, where he could get a train back to the City in a few moments. To his own amazement, he was quite happy, he was even more than happy. A species of exaltation possessed him. Even the thought of himself, Arthur Carroll, posing nightly as a buffoon before the City crowds, did not daunt him. He realized a kind of joyful acquiescence with even that. He felt a happy patience when he considered the time that might elapse before he could see his family again. He passed the butcher's shop, and reflected with delight ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same phrase; and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some modem writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying his text ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... signed under her own name, making an appointment for that night; but at the same time Galliard, claiming a former promise, drags his friend off to visit Euphemia. The intrigue is complicated by the ridiculous amours of two foolish travellers, Sir Signal Buffoon and Mr. Tickletext, a puritan divine, his tutor. These, unknown to each other, make assignations with the two bona robas by means of Petro, who dupes them thoroughly by his clever tricks, and pockets their money. Whilst Galliard and Sir Harry are serenading ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... yet a respectable man. Indiscriminate familiarity either offends your superiors, or else dubs you their dependent and led captain. It gives your inferiors just, but troublesome and improper claims to equality. A joker is near a-kin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... 135. I have softened some of the most improbable circumstances of this wretched biographer. From his ill-worded narration, it should seem that the prince's buffoon having accidentally entered the tent, and awakened the slumbering monarch, the fear of punishment urged him to persuade the disaffected soldiers ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... mortality according to Buffoon's tables, and those of Parcieux and others, all of which were based on the aggregate of all classes and conditions. Those who made the estimate, however, forgot the dangers of infancy, indulged in general calculations, and ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... him, as Cicero says, absolutely odious, utter disgust being excited by his drinking bouts at all hours, his wild expenses, his gross amours, the day spent in sleeping or walking off his debauches, and the night in banquets and at theaters, and in celebrating the nuptials of some comedian or buffoon. It is related that, drinking all night at the wedding of Hippias, the comedian, on the morning, having to harangue the people, he came forward, overcharged as he was, and vomited before them all, one of his friends holding his gown for him. Sergius, the player, was one of the friends who ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... went on in this fashion But his incapacity for doing anything as well as his impassiveness eventually exasperated his relatives, and he became a laughing-stock, a sort of martyred buffoon, a prey given over to native ferocity, to the savage gaiety of the brutes who ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... then the diversion of the spectator, in the way of laughing, for its object, should preserve a moderately buffoon simplicity, and the dancer, aided by a natural genius, but especially by throwing as much nature as possible into his execution, may promise himself to amuse and please the spectator; even though he should not be very deep in ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... keep the peace by Fielding, and knew Cagliostro. The friend of popes and kings and noblemen, and of all the male and female ruffians and vagabonds of Europe, abbe, soldier, charlatan, gamester, financier, diplomatist, viveur, philosopher, virtuoso, "chemist, fiddler, and buffoon," each of these, and all of these was Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt, Knight of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... repeated, with glistening eyes, "you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your zany, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Peterkin somewhat rudely interrupted me by uttering a wild scream, and beginning to caper as if he were a madman. I was much alarmed as well as surprised at this course of conduct; for although my friend was an inveterate joker, he was the very reverse of what is termed a buffoon, and never indulged in personally grotesque actions with a view to make people laugh—such as making faces, a practice which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, causes the face-makers to look idiotical rather than funny, and ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... Irving. If Joseph had taken his snuff as this one does, Lady Sneerwell would have sent him to the kitchen. If he had made love to Lady Teazle as this one does, she would have suspected him of weak intellect. Sheridan's Joseph was a man of culture: Mr. Henley's is a buffoon. It is not, perhaps, so much this gentleman's fault as his misfortune that his acting is without either art or craft; but then he was not compelled to play Joseph Surface. Indeed, we may go further, and say that if he is a man ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... supplied every defect; was an insatiable and universal reader; meant for the Church, took to poetry and philosophy, became an author, putting forth the strangest books with the strangest titles; considered for a time a strange, crack-brained mixture of enthusiast and buffoon; was recognised at last as a man of infinite humour, sensibility, force, and penetration; his writings procured him friends and fame, and at length a wife and a settled pension; settled in Baireuth, where he lived thenceforth ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... stand the test of argument; they know their weakness, and try to turn it off with a jest. Full of vanity and boasting, they venture not to examine even themselves. They philosophers, indeed! worthy disciples of Democritus; who DID nothing but laugh, and WAS nothing but a buffoon. I am rightly served, however, for beginning a correspondence like this; and still more for writing a ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, inquisitive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that, in the midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... whom heaven itself obeys, Hopeless of pleasing, yet inclin'd to please. Here then at once, I welcome every shame, 15 And cancel at threescore a life of fame; No more my titles shall my children tell, The old buffoon will fit my name as well; This day beyond its term my fate extends, For life is ended when our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... great and small, most of them kept open at the public expense, and all of them crowded every night. Among the gaunt, haggard forms of famine and nakedness, amidst the yells of murder, the tears of affliction, and the cries of despair, the song, the dance, the mimic scene, the buffoon laughter, went on as regularly as in the gay hour of festive peace. I have it from good authority, that under the scaffold of judicial murder, and the gaping planks that poured down blood on the spectators, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... shoulders. Jonathas, opening wide his little eyes, gave a forced, buffoon-like laugh. Nothing could be more absurd, said he, than the idea that a human body could have eternal life; and he declaimed, for the benefit of the proconsul, this line from a ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... such good terms, and so accustomed to support each other's play, that the SPRUCH-SPRECHER often condescended to follow up the jester's witticisms with an explanation, to render them more obvious to the capacity of the audience, so that his wisdom became a sort of commentary on the buffoon's folly. And sometimes, in requital, the HOFF-NARR, with a pithy jest, wound up the conclusion of the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... taken from the inanimate face of the Emperor, and brought to Europe by Dr. Antommarchi, had been moulded in bronze and sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe, and had then inspired surprise and mistrust. People suspected the Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and famished, of having tried to make fun of people. Disciples of Dr. Gall, whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious. They did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the forehead, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... who in figure, manners, and mind was in the strongest contrast to all the English kings who had preceded him, was infinitely more mischievous than a more foolish monarch could have been. Coarse in manner—a buffoon in demeanor—so weak, that in many matters he suffered himself to be a puppet in the hands of the profligates who surrounded him, he had yet a certain amount of cleverness, and an obstinacy which nothing could overcome. He brought with him from Scotland an overweening opinion ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... but as they had made no alterations in the original rude form of this poem, and as Thespis was the first that made any improvement in it, he was generally esteemed its inventor. Before him, tragedy was no more than a jumble of buffoon tales in the comic style, intermixed with the singing of a chorus in praise of Bacchus; for it is to the feasts of that god, celebrated at the time of the vintage, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... truth which she fully believes all competent people know, but which none has heretofore been brave enough to utter.) You see, the thing that gravels her is that I am so persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely covered my case—which she ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... founded upon Eating and Drinking, which are Points wherein most Men agree, and in which the Learned and Illiterate, the Dull and the Airy, the Philosopher and the Buffoon, can all of them bear a Part. The 'Kit-Cat' [1] it self is said to have taken its Original from a Mutton-Pye. The 'Beef-Steak' [2] and October [3] Clubs, are neither of them averse to Eating and Drinking, if we may form a Judgment of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... syl.), a popular name among the Dutch for a buffoon; a corruption of pickle-h[:a]rin ("a hairy sprite"), answering ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the respect due to you, Madam, allow me to say that there is one thing in your court which it is sad to find there. It is that everybody takes the liberty of talking, and that the most honourable man is exposed to the scoffing of the first buffoon ...
— The Magnificent Lovers (Les Amants magnifiques) • Moliere
... dispersed, suddenly there was an alarm of a night attack. Firing commenced all round the town, which was a most unusual occurrence for a Sunday night. In an instant the man who had been masquerading as a buffoon was again the commanding officer, stern and alert. The tramp of many feet was heard in the streets, which proved to be the reserve squadron of the Protectorate Regiment, summoned in haste to headquarters. A Maxim arrived, as by magic, from somewhere else, the town guard were ordered to ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... determined to answer as if he thought the question were a jest, replied in the bantering tone of a buffoon: ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... excellent managers of that excellent institution, that a more worthy, modest, sober, and loyal man does not exist in his majesty's dominions than this distinguished poet, whom some of his waggish friends have taken up the absurd fancy of exhibiting in print as a sort of boozing buffoon; and who is now, instead of revelling in the license of tavern-suppers and party politics, bearing up, as he may, against severe and unmerited misfortunes, in as dreary a solitude as ever nursed the melancholy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... origin of foreign luxury imported into the city.——At entertainments—were introduced players on the harp and timbrel, with buffoons for the diversion of the guests." Baker. Professor Anthon, who quotes this passage, says that histrio "here denotes a buffoon kept for the amusement of the company." But such is not the meaning of the word histrio. It signifies one who in some way acted, either by dancing and gesticulation, or by reciting, perhaps to the music of the sambucistriae or other minstrels. ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... visited church, and on feast days actually went to confession! He a heretic? He was a chatterbox, a boastful coward, nothing more! But the day of reckoning was at hand, and soon there would be nothing left of the great philosopher but a quill-driving buffoon. ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... still serving in the army, and, according to common report, is one of the best gentlemen in the world. My son does not like him so well as his good-for-nothing brother, because he is too serious, and would not become his buffoon. My son excuses himself by saying that when he quits business he wants something to make him laugh, and that young Broglie is not old enough for this; that if he had a confidential business, or a warlike expedition to perform, ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakespeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural that Hamlet—a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation—should express himself ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... desire for a place. To whom is he to apply? Not to the great man; for to him he hath no access. He therefore applies to A, who is the creature of B, who is the tool of C, who is the flatterer of D, who is the catamite of E, who is the pimp of F, who is the bully of G, who is the buffoon of I, who is the husband of K, who is the whore of L, who is the bastard of M, who is the instrument of the great man. Thus the smile descending regularly from the great man to A, is discounted back again, and at last paid ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... twenty-seventh of March 1625, he expired. Under his weak rule, the spirit of liberty had grown strong, and had become equal to a great contest. The contest was brought on by the policy of his successor. Charles bore no resemblance to his father. He was not a driveller, or a pedant, or a buffoon, or a coward. It would be absurd to deny that he was a scholar and a gentleman, a man of exquisite tastes in the fine arts, a man of strict morals in private life. His talents for business were respectable; his demeanour was kingly. But he was false, imperious, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... do not appear to be remarkable for the number of their dramatis personae. In most there is a prince, a confidant, a buffoon or two, and a due proportion of female characters, represented by boys dressed in female attire. The dresses are handsome; and in one which I attended, the dialogue appeared to be lively and well supported, as far as I can judge ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... transformed of a sudden from a gentleman student to a dancing buffoon; for such, in fact, was the character in which I made my debut. I was one of those who formed the groups in the dramas, and were principally, employed on the stage in front of the booth, to attract company. I was equipped as a satyr, in a dress of drab frize ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... sleighs come galloping down, with a jangle of bells, full of laughing, singing young people, returning from some excursion far up in the hills, where there had been feasting and dancing. Here a young lawyer—newly married and something of a privileged buffoon—was sitting on the lap of somebody else's wife, playing a concertina, and singing at the top of his voice. "Some of that Loreng man's doings again," people would say. "The place has never been the same since he came here." And they would get back to bed again, ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... associates in folly; and the soprano's manner seemed to declare that, if ever he had held the candle for Don Serafino, he did not grudge the grease that might have dropped on his cassock. He was soon prime favourite and court buffoon in the Duchess's circle, organising pleasure-parties, composing scenarios for her Highness's private theatre, and producing at court any comedian or juggler the report of whose ability reached him from the market-place. Indefatigable in the contriving of such diversions, he soon ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... particular, nearly all simple folks, had a desire to laugh, even when they were worn out with fatigue, which made a pretext of the slightest thing, and notably of danger. One of them, called Tailleur, a buffoon with the airs of an executioner's assistant, would call out at the first explosions of a hurricane ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... individuals at the same time. We did not know that the theory of evolution was one that had been quietly but steadily gaining ground during the last hundred years. Buffon we knew by name, but he sounded too like "buffoon" for any good to come from him. We had heard also of Lamarck, and held him to be a kind of French Lord Monboddo; but we knew nothing of his doctrine save through the caricatures promulgated by his opponents, or the misrepresentations ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... and notwithstanding the universal notion that you sell yourself to him by giving him three drops of your blood, or by signing a compact with your blood, yet many stories of this class are evidently pre-Christian. He is generally represented as a buffoon, and easily outwitted. Further particulars respecting him will be found in the Introduction. The stories incidentally referred to in this section of our work ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... she had too many gewgaws and playthings, and I found, after not many days, that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank from my Lady's keeping-room to the antechamber, and thence to the servant's hall, and thence, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... victuallers having failed to raise a PUBLIC PURSE, which was as stimulating a bait to the independent candidates for Garrat, as it is to the independent candidates for a certain assembly; the borough of Garrat has since remained vacant, and the populace have been without a professed political buffoon. ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... further proof of the urgent need for conscientious inquiry, call it by what name you please. The science of common sense is all-sufficient. The seemingly intelligent individual who can only find material for ribaldry in this connection is a more serious buffoon than he imagines. It is apparent that our methods are wrong. Any constructive effort to correct them is commendable. When it is stated that 20 per cent. of the American women are unable to bear children, and that 25 per cent. of all the others are unwilling to assume ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... replied Antonio in a tone of indifference which almost amounted to contempt. "Signor Formica! In what way can that buffoon help me?" ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... 'Gainst Baal no Combatant more fierce than he; For Israels asserted Liberty, No Man more bold; with generous Rage enflam'd, Against the old ensnaring Test declaim'd. Beside, he bore a most peculiar Hate To sleeping Pilots, all Earth-clods of State. None more abhorr'd the Sycophant Buffoon, And Parasite, th'excrescence of a Throne; Creatures who their creating Sun disgrace, A Brood more abject than Niles Slime-born Race. Such was the Brave Achitophel; a Mind, (If but the Heart and Face were of a kind) So far from being ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... tower, whose walls are of great thickness, Henry Marten was imprisoned. He was one of the court that tried King Charles, and his signature is upon the king's death-warrant. He was a spendthrift, and afterwards had a quarrel with Cromwell, who denounced him as an unbeliever, and even as a buffoon. When Charles II. made the proclamation of amnesty, Marten surrendered, but he was tried and condemned to death. He plead that he came in under the proffer of mercy, and the sentence was commuted to a life imprisonment; and after a short confinement in the Tower of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... made merry over the ivory, apes, and peacocks of existence. He seems less French than he is in his self-mockery, yet he is a true son of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... I reckon, ever'one here believes that yarn. It fits tew pat, not tew be true. So me an' Spike are th' true murderers, be we? Wal, this is sum unexpected an' s'prisin', ain't it Spike?" and he turned to his comrade, grinning and glaring like a huge buffoon; but a close observer might have noticed that his skin had whitened beneath its ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... Worcester the Roman Catholic worship was violently interrupted. [106] At Bristol the rabble, countenanced, it was said, by the magistrates, exhibited a profane and indecent pageant, in which the Virgin Mary was represented by a buffoon, and in which a mock host was carried in procession. The garrison was called out to disperse the mob. The mob, then and ever since one of the fiercest in the kingdom, resisted. Blows were exchanged, and serious hurts inflicted. [107] ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... admiring regret; all this, too, to be effected by one so long hated, one whom I was the only being forbidden the comparative happiness of despising? I could not brook it; the insult, the insulter, were too revolting. As the unhappy buffoon approached me, thrusting his distorted face towards mine, I seized and pushed him aside, with a brief curse and a violent hand. The sharp point of the umbrella slipped; my action gave it impetus and weight; it penetrated his eye, and—spare ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was of course neglected by the fiddling, gambling, wenching, royal buffoon, who succeeded the royal martyr, and whose necessities he had supplied, when an outcast pauper exile in a foreign land, from the proceeds of those very estates which he had so nearly lost in fighting for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... of the piece, Grimaldi waited upon the Mussulman for the usual present. If the Turk had concealed the expression of his anger at the accident, it was not however extinct, for on the appearance of the buffoon, he directed him to be seized by his attendants, and transported in his theatrical costume, to his residence, where, after undergoing a severe bastinado, the hapless actor was thrust into the street, with only his pedal honour for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... the assaults upon the governing classes generally stirred his wrath. The satire upon individuals may be all very well in its place, but a man, he said, has no business to set up as the 'regenerator of society' because he is its most 'distinguished buffoon.' He was not picking his words, and 'buffoon' is certainly an injudicious phrase; but the sentiment which it expressed was so characteristic and deeply rooted that I must dwell a little upon its manifestation at ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Being, by those arts, raised above himself, he became the declared enemy of all good men, and acted a distinguished part among the vilest instruments of that pernicious court. See his character, Annals xv. s. 34. When an illiberal and low buffoon basks in the sunshine of a court, and enjoys exorbitant power, the cause of literature can have nothing to expect. The liberal arts must, by consequence, be degraded by a corrupt taste, and learning will be left to run wild ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... no wonder: he was a cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a great musician and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, liked nothing so well as to bring into his house any buffoon or strolling player to make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hot-tempered, forgiving, and with a power of learning and a power of work which were prodigious, even in those hard-working days. Rabelais chaffs Rondelet, under the name of Rondibilis; for, indeed, Rondelet grew up into ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... noblesse, have been recalled from the army, and replaced by officers chosen by the soldiers themselves, [Under the rank of field-officers.] whose affections are often conciliated by qualities not essentially military, though sometimes professional. A buffoon, or a pot-companion, is, of course, often more popular than a disciplinarian; and the brightest talents lose their influence when put in competition with a head that can bear a greater number ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Jackal, 'you have certainly made me laugh, but I doubt if you could make me cry. It is easy enough to be a buffoon; it is more difficult to ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... you to say? What explanation have you to offer for your conduct? You have behaved like a buffoon, sir—d'you hear ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... project was a daring one, in view of Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne, a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a place betrays in Scott's eminently sane and balanced mind a curious strain of impracticality, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... knocking furniture about for months. The fact is that nobody understands the complaint, nor can detect the cause that makes the ghost of a man who was perfectly rational in life behave like an uneducated buffoon afterwards. The real reason, as I have tried to explain to you, is a solution of continuity between subjective thought and will on the side of the spectre, and objective ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... he hold the attention of such audiences without condescending to flatter their prejudices, or without occasionally acting the part of the sophist and the buffoon? Much may be said, in accounting for this phenomenon, about his widely extended reputation, his imposing presence, the vulgar curiosity to see a man whom even the smallest country newspaper thought of sufficient importance to defame, his power of giving vitality to simple words which ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... his thick bill to talk with a city accent! Ah, you wish to bite off bits of slang? My friend, they are green! Every grape you pick breaks in your jaws, for city grapes are glass bubbles! Having taken from the sparrow only his make-up and grimace, you are just a clumsy understudy, a sort of vice-buffoon! And you serve up stale old cynicisms picked up with crumbs in fashionable club-rooms, poor little bird, and think to astonish us with your budget of ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... tolerate his presence for a moment. You know how I live, and that my sole attendant is a female. I allow no male servants within this house. Even when his Royal Highness honours me with his presence he is unattended. I desire that I am immediately released from the presence of this buffoon." ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... teach their children to behave "pretty"—thinking good and quiet synonymous. Somehow, the little fellows, unfortunately, take the Lark for Mr. Spohf, who has hitherto done the funny in a refined style, scarcely to be imagined—an elegant, amiable, fun,—a mixture of the buffoon and gentleman, the sublime and the ridiculous, quite marvellous to behold,—making our little friend (who you are aware was moulded in one of Nature's odd freaks) appear, to tender imaginations, almost supernatural. The mistake and misplaced approbation ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... has become somewhat melancholy of late and says that he is studying the phenomena of "Unconscious Cerebration," which Milburd explains is only a name for thinking of nothing without knowing it. Boodels, in consequence, thinks Milburd a mere buffoon.] ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... the country. At Coventry and Worcester the Roman Catholic worship was violently interrupted. [106] At Bristol the rabble, countenanced, it was said, by the magistrates, exhibited a profane and indecent pageant, in which the Virgin Mary was represented by a buffoon, and in which a mock host was carried in procession. The garrison was called out to disperse the mob. The mob, then and ever since one of the fiercest in the kingdom, resisted. Blows were exchanged, and serious hurts ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my nature to derive consolation from such scenes; from theatres, whose buffoon laughter and discordant mirth awakened distempered sympathy, or where fictitious tears and wailings mocked the heart-felt grief within; from festival or crowded meeting, where hilarity sprung from the worst feelings of our nature, or such enthralment of the better ones, as impressed it with ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... which men enjoyed, in the Middle Ages, silly, teazing or puzzling answers; the questioner remaining at the end rolled up in the repartees, gasping as a fly caught in a spider's web. The Court fool or buffoon had for his principal merit his clever knack of returning witty or confusing answers; the best of them were preserved; itinerant minstrels remembered and repeated them; clerks turned them into Latin, and gave them place in their collections of exempla. They afforded amusement ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... than to give utterance to a few sentimental odes and elegant ballads of their own, and for this reason they have fictitiously invented the names and surnames of both men and women, and necessarily introduced, in addition, some low characters, who should, like a buffoon in a play, create some excitement ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... had come to the conclusion that the less the settlers knew of pleasure the better, and therefore he laid down the law that all strolling popular entertainers should be forbidden to enter the holy city. No public buffoon ever cracked his jokes at Herrnhut. No tight-rope dancer poised on giddy height. No barrel-dancer rolled his empty barrel. No tout for lotteries swindled the simple. No juggler mystified the children. No cheap-jack cheated the innocent maidens. No quack-doctor sold his nasty pills. No melancholy ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... the same place, one who wheadles as much as the other boasts, and plays the Knave as much as the other does the Fool. For the Reader's Satisfaction, here follows a Translation of the first Act of the Miles Gloriosus, which begins between that Blockhead and his Buffoon. ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... is any other nation in Europe, after the Russians, who have greater facility—if properly cultivated—and are more capable of learning languages to perfection than the English. I am not referring to every shameless holiday tripper on the Continent who makes himself a buffoon by using misapplied, mispronounced, self-mistaught French or Italian or German sentences, but I mean the rare observant Englishman who studies languages ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the theaters without charge to the people, and gave a public notice that he would handsomely reward any person who invented a new amusement for the occasion. Various public performers contended for the prize. Among them came a Buffoon well known among the populace for his jokes, and said that he had a kind of entertainment which had never been brought out on any stage before. This report being spread about made a great stir, and the theater was crowded in every part. The Buffoon appeared ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... that Maitland should within a few years have had two sovereigns as passengers,—one the central figure of modern European history, the other the good-natured elderly buffoon who in this country is chiefly remembered as the husband of the friend of Lady Hamilton. ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... strolling player; stager, performer; mime, mimer^; artists; comedian, tragedian; tragedienne, Roscius; star, movie star, star of stage and screen, superstar, idol, sex symbol; supporting actor, supporting cast; ham, hamfatter [Slang]; masker^. pantomimist, clown harlequin, buffo^, buffoon, farceur, grimacer, pantaloon, columbine; punchinello^; pulcinello^, pulcinella^; extra, bit- player, walk-on role, cameo appearance; mute, figurante^, general utility; super, supernumerary. company; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Marten was imprisoned. He was one of the court that tried King Charles, and his signature is upon the king's death-warrant. He was a spendthrift, and afterwards had a quarrel with Cromwell, who denounced him as an unbeliever, and even as a buffoon. When Charles II. made the proclamation of amnesty, Marten surrendered, but he was tried and condemned to death. He plead that he came in under the proffer of mercy, and the sentence was commuted to a life imprisonment; and after a short confinement ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... time in this way, his eyes abstracted from Joseph, fixed on the darkness of the room. While listening to him Joseph had often asked himself if there were a real inspiration behind that lean face, carven like a marble, with prominent nose and fading chin, or if he were a mere buffoon. ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... that there was nothing of gladness in the worship of God—that it consisted simply of a chronic case of the snuffles. Jones has simply gone to the opposite extreme and transformed the Temple of the Deity into a variety dive. Nero fiddled while Rome burned; but Jones indulges in the levity of the buffoon while consigning millions of human beings to Hell. Alas, that so few preachers understand the pity which ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Being only thirty-three years exposed, the paintings on the walls and the vases are remarkably well preserved. This tomb contains the ashes of the dependents of Tiberius, the contemporary of our Lord. One pigeon-hole is filled with the calcined bones of the court buffoon, a poor deaf and dumb slave who had wonderful powers of mimicry, and used to amuse his morose master by imitating the gesticulations of the advocates pleading in the Forum. Another pigeon-hole contains the remains of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... conscience, affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness.' Though—he says—he cannot wholly escape 'from some the imputation of sharpness,' he does not feel guilty of having offered insult to anyone, 'except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon.' But—'I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order of state I have provoked? ... What public person? Whether I have not, in all these, preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? ... Where have ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... that would have eclipsed Liston in his best days, and as supple in the movements of his joints as any clown on the stage. He imitated every movement we made, and burlesqued them to a very high degree, causing great laughter to his companions and us. He seems to be the buffoon of the tribe. The other natives delighted in making sport of him, by ridiculing the shortness of his stature and laughing at him ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... puzzled, as if this laughter disclosed something that he had never suspected in her. But then Cassandra's face caught his eye, gazing with astonishment at the buffoon, not laughing, too deeply intent and surprised to laugh at what she saw, and for some moments he watched her as if ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... persons seldom supposed to be themselves conjurers. He becomes a formidable opponent to Theodorick and his chivalry; but as he attempted by treachery to attain the victory, he is, when overcome, condemned to fill the dishonourable yet appropriate office of buffoon and juggler at the Court ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... rightly guide and bear with her weakness; was no prop to the "child," and believes himself absolved by this severe castigation. Qu'est-ce qu'il me chante? Has the letter undergone transformation in the Christian climate of Reinfeld, or did it leave the hand of this once shallow buffoon in its present form? He asserts, moreover, that he lives in a never dreamed of happiness with his present wife, whose acquaintance he made a week before the engagement, and whom he married six weeks after the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... by the mouth of Ariste: for The School for Husbands was performed on the 24th of June, 1661, and about eight months later, on the 20th of February, 1662, he married Armande Bjart, being then about double her age. As to Sganarelle in this play, he ceases to be a mere buffoon, as in some of Molire's farces, and becomes the personification of an idea or of a folly which has to ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... art anything, but what thou shouldst be; prithee, Major, leave off being an old Buffoon, that is, a Lover turn'd ridiculous by Age, consider thy self a mere rouling Tun of Nantz,—a walking Chimney, ever smoaking with nasty Mundungus, and then thou hast a Countenance like ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... a wife and daughter: his wife's name was Francisquine; his daughter married the celebrated buffoon Gaultier Garguille. The story goes that when he left Mondor he bought a small country-place near Paris, where he passed his latter days comfortably on his earnings. There are two traditions current as to the manner of his death: according to one, he was killed by some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... and Horace was the son of an emancipated slave. The Roman leech and chirurgeon were often slaves; so, too, the preceptor and the pedagogue, the reader and the player, the clerk and the amanuensis, the singer, the dancer, the wrestler, and the buffoon, the architect, the smith, the weaver, and the shoemaker; even the armiger or squire was a slave. Educated slaves exercised their talents and pursued their callings for the emolument of their masters; and thus it is to-day in Siam. Mutato nomine, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... the Grecian chiefs, and limiting the interest to the amours of Troilus and Cressida. But he could not be insensible to the merit of this scene, though he has supplied it by one far inferior, in which Ulysses is introduced, using gross flattery to the buffoon Thersites. In the latter part of the play, Dryden has successfully exerted his own inventive powers. The quarrelling scene between Hector and Troilus is very impressive, and no bad imitation of that betwixt Brutus and Cassius, with which ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... disorder—Corkran"—the Slave of the Lamp smiled politely—"McTurk"—the Irishman scowled—"and, of course, the unspeakable Beetle, our friend Gigadibs." Abanazar, the Emperor, and Aladdin had more or less of characters, and King passed them over. "Come forth, my inky buffoon, from behind yonder instrument of music! You supply, I presume, the doggerel for this entertainment. Esteem yourself to be, as ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... was no doubt extremely coarse, and moreover it was premeditated, but after all Ferdishenko had persuaded everyone to accept him as a buffoon. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... seconded, one Rogers, a publican, got up and said he had something to say. There was indescribable confusion, some crying, "Turn him out;" others "Pitch into 'em, Bill." Bill Rogers was well known as the funny man in Cowfold, a half-drunken buffoon, whose wit, such as it was, was retailed all over the place; a man who was specially pleased if he could be present in any assembly collected for any serious purpose and turn it into ridicule. He ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... comedietta," I said, abruptly and harshly. "We have seen it acted to-night. In a few days I shall play the part of the chief buffoon—in other ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... poor Ansolini played the buffoon. I knew they feared it was wine, I had been so silent until now; but I did not care, I ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... so various, that he seem'd to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.[268-4] ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... owe Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that, in the midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter? For all the deeper suffering, I am conscious of writhing ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... nor to recall attention to it by subtle protestation of his pretended persuasion. But once or twice before sundown he permitted himself to ask natural questions concerning the old country, and to indulge in those genial gibes which the Englishman in the bush learns to expect from the indigenous buffoon. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... ... son follow'd, of congenial quill, As near the dirt and no less prone to ill. Walcot, of English heart, had English pen, Buffoon he might be, but for hire was none; Nor plumed and mounted in Professor's chair Offer'd to grin for wages ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... stateliness by which the same language is equally characterized. Tacitus has been sometimes represented as a very Diogenes, for carping and sarcasm—a very Aristophanes, to blacken character with ridicule and reproach. But he is as far removed from the cynic or the buffoon, as from the panegyrist or the flatterer. He is not the indiscriminate admirer that Plutarch was. Nor is he such a universal hater as Sallust. It is the fault of the times that he is obliged to deal so much in censure. ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Quarterly Review. The project was a daring one, in view of Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne, a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a place betrays in Scott's eminently sane and balanced mind a curious ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... together. Aldebaran showed a brave front to the crowd, glad of the painted mask that hid his features, and no one guessed the misery that lurked beneath his laugh, and no one knew what mighty tax it was upon his courage to follow in the Jester's lead and play buffoon upon the open street. It was a thing he loathed, and yet, 'twas as the Jester said, his training in the royal court had made him sharp of wit and quick to read men's minds; and to the countrymen who gathered there agape, around him in the square, his keen replies were wonderful ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief. The societies had regular constitutions. Their presiding officers were called kings, princes, captains, archdeacons, or rejoiced in similar high-sounding names. Each chamber had its treasurer, its buffoon, and its standard-bearer for public processions. Each had its peculiar title or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate motto. By the year 1493, the associations had ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... I told you. I'm silly. I'm a buffoon.—But haven't we had a great afternoon?" he ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... Deputies were accordingly sent immediately, for whose return the bulk of the members stayed in the Great Chamber. I was informed that this was one trick among others concerted to ruin me, and, telling the Duc d'Orleans of it, he said that if the old buffoon, the Keeper of the Seals, was concerned in such a complication of folly and knavery, he deserved to be hanged by the side of Mazarin. But the sequel showed that I was not ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... person as you find him here, who was indeed for his senseless humour of designing to govern—us'd no otherwise than as the Buffoon of the Family—takes upon him to call Don Quixot (whom the Authour imbellishes, with all manner of learning and good sense, bating his whimsical Chimaera of Knight Errantry,) Goodman Dulpate and Don Coxcomb. Well, however the Switcher here ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... as well as epic poems, may become worthy the perusal of the greatest of men: but when no moral, no lesson, no instruction, is conveyed to the reader, where the whole design of the composition is no more than to make us laugh, the writer comes very near to the character of a buffoon; and his admirers, if an old Latin proverb be true, deserve no great compliments to be paid to ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... considerable number of individuals at the same time. We did not know that the theory of evolution was one that had been quietly but steadily gaining ground during the last hundred years. Buffon we knew by name, but he sounded too like "buffoon" for any good to come from him. We had heard also of Lamarck, and held him to be a kind of French Lord Monboddo; but we knew nothing of his doctrine save through the caricatures promulgated by his opponents, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... executed accordingly, exclaiming as he departed—"Oh, city and court! you by whom the expectations of the bold pretender are fulfilled, while the hopes of the modest labourer are destroyed; you who abundantly sustain the shameless Buffoon, while the worthy sage is left to die of hunger; I bid you farewell." That said, he proceeded to Flanders, where he finished in arms the life which he might have rendered immortal by letters, and died in the company of his friend the Captain Don Diego, leaving behind him the reputation ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the poor girl was only imprudent: at all events, she repents her folly too late. She has now no friend upon earth but Mrs. Freke, who is, in fact, her worst enemy, and who tyrannizes over her without mercy. Imagine what it is to be the butt of a buffoon!" ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... Defence for the English People in reply to an infamous Book entitled 'Cry of the King's Blood against the English Parricides.' To which is added A Public Testimony of Alexander Morus, Churchman, and Professor of Sacred Literature, in reply to the Calumnies of John Milton, Buffoon. Printed at the Hague by Adrian Ulac, 1654.") The reprint of Milton's Defensio Secunda fills 128 pages of the volume; More's appended Fides Publica, or Public Testimony, in reply, is in larger type and fills 129 ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... second. But whatever else the thing was, it was English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday: he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon, improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound in the Victorians than even their just and exquisite appreciation of children. It came from the deep ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... appointment for that night; but at the same time Galliard, claiming a former promise, drags his friend off to visit Euphemia. The intrigue is complicated by the ridiculous amours of two foolish travellers, Sir Signal Buffoon and Mr. Tickletext, a puritan divine, his tutor. These, unknown to each other, make assignations with the two bona robas by means of Petro, who dupes them thoroughly by his clever tricks, and pockets their money. Whilst Galliard and Sir Harry are serenading the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... the hole in the side door? And didst thou not say to me, 'I am sworn never to open the door till thou show me the purse?'" Quoth Hasan? "By Allah, 'twas not I who took it, but Zurayk!" Quoth Ali, "Needs must I get it again," and repaired to the house of the wedding, where he heard the buffoon[FN247] say, "Bravo,[FN248] O Abu Abdallah! Good luck to thee with thy son!" Said Ali, "My luck is in the ascendant," and going to the fishmonger's lodging, climbed over the back wall of the house and found his wife asleep. So he drugged her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... fables are spoken of by Aristophanes as something laughable, and the fabulist came to be regarded as a humorist. This feeling gained ground so much afterwards that Lucian makes AEsop act the part of a buffoon in "The Isles of the Blessed." Such views no doubt influenced the traditions with regard to the condition and characteristics of their composer. There was the more field for this, inasmuch as even the fables were only ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... her. She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why should he pick me for a bad ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... many tragic and comic poets before Thespis; but as they had made no alterations in the original rude form of this poem, and as Thespis was the first that made any improvement in it, he was generally esteemed its inventor. Before him, tragedy was no more than a jumble of buffoon tales in the comic style, intermixed with the singing of a chorus in praise of Bacchus; for it is to the feasts of that god, celebrated at the time of the vintage, that ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... retired awkwardly, and with his confidence unspoken, before the dark, humorous eyes, that seemed almost too tolerant of his grievance. He had been to levees, and his heart had sunk equally before the vulgar crowd, who seemed to regard this man as their own buffoon, and the pompousness of position, learning and dignity, which he seemed to delight to ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... the writer of that letter from my heart; he was a man of thought on the most important subjects. But, indeed, had I lived in the Middle Ages (I am heartily glad that I did not) I should have been an eremite myself—if I had not been a professed buffoon, that is. These were the only philosophical lives yet open: laughter or prayer; sneers, we might say, and tears. Until the sun of the Positive arose, the wise man had to make his choice between ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... course this is only your nonsense; but don't you see, Miss Mannersley thinks it all in earnest and really your nature?" I hesitated, for it suddenly struck me that it WAS really his nature. "And—hang it all!—you don't want her to believe you a common buffoon., or some ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the marble walk which led to the rear. Up the winding steps to the front entrance, where swung the marvelous bronze doors which had stirred the imaginations of two continents, streamed the favored of the fashionable world. Among them Carmen saw many whom she recognized. The buffoon, Larry Beers, was there, swinging jauntily along with the bejeweled wife of Samson, the multimillionaire packer. Kane and his wife, and Weston followed. Outside the gates there was incessant chugging of automobiles, mingled with the shouted orders of the three policemen detailed to direct the traffic. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... beginning to caper as if he were a madman. I was much alarmed as well as surprised at this course of conduct; for although my friend was an inveterate joker, he was the very reverse of what is termed a buffoon, and never indulged in personally grotesque actions with a view to make people laugh—such as making faces, a practice which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, causes the face-makers to look idiotical rather ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... play, that the SPRUCH-SPRECHER often condescended to follow up the jester's witticisms with an explanation, to render them more obvious to the capacity of the audience, so that his wisdom became a sort of commentary on the buffoon's folly. And sometimes, in requital, the HOFF-NARR, with a pithy jest, wound up the conclusion of the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... bells, full of laughing, singing young people, returning from some excursion far up in the hills, where there had been feasting and dancing. Here a young lawyer—newly married and something of a privileged buffoon—was sitting on the lap of somebody else's wife, playing a concertina, and singing at the top of his voice. "Some of that Loreng man's doings again," people would say. "The place has never been the same since he came ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... candid reader has probably been conscious of a growing persuasion that this author must be at bottom a serious if also a humorous man,—a man, therefore, excusably intent not to be misunderstood as a mere buffoon. But now let the candid reader proceed with the following, and confess, upon his honor, if he is not scandalized and perplexed. What shall be said of a writer who thus ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... foolish hope was this! I realised too soon The special form of Nemesis That waits on the buffoon: The joke I found concerned the gloom ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... amiss. In cases where there is danger of degrading the part, the stage manager should take care to intrust such roles to the very actors who at first thought might seem least suited for them—those whose personalities will compel them to raise the part to a higher level. The buffoon and sometimes even the finer comedian cannot free Shakespeare from the reproach of having given two kings of Denmark a clown as Prime Minister. It is very much less necessary that the audience should laugh at Polonius' quips than that the quips should in no wise impair his position ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... leading Buffoon of the Party). I wonder if she's got any money. If she 'as, I'll go ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... in a menacing tone, "it is high time this nonsense was ended. I am tired of being made a buffoon of for your party. For your gratification I have spent a sleepless night in those cold, damp woods; and I warn you that practical joking can be carried too far. I will not go to Canada, and I insist that you ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... not by his grotesque antics and claptrap tricks bring in as many pence as his patrons believed he might; again let alone when he had been lucky, and they were in a good humour with themselves and all the world. He acted as bear-leader and buffoon, villain and hero, alternately in public; while in private he was cook, drudge, messman, and menagerie manager for the rest of the party, for animals of some sort invariably formed part of the attractions of the troupe. Now it was a performing poodle, picked up somewhere ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... Longbow, as we called him; I suppose as a term of endearment, for there was no Young Longbow. He was an Irishman, and the established wit, buffoon, and jester of the school. Innumerable stories are still told of his youthful escapades, of his audacity and skill in cribbing, of his dexterity in getting out of scrapes, of his repartees to masters and persons in authority. He it was who took up the same exercise ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... to say? What explanation have you to offer for your conduct? You have behaved like a buffoon, ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... furnished her with a strange experience. Buffoon though he was, still she had to admire his wide information and worldly wisdom; and though she could not agree with his views of hopping, she was amazed by all the new things he had taught her in their brief conversation. If he had been more ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... mail-coach to come trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite book Till Eulenspiegel, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something. Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... times of the day groups of priests and novices move up and down the market collecting offerings from the people, while some "original" or buffoon gives the scene its touch ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... two characters in the scene (act iii. sc. I) are Puntarvolo who, as his crest is a Boar, must be intended to represent Bacon;[2] and Carlo Buffone who is a buffoon ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... Hieragonisticon, or Corah's Doom, being an Answer to, etc., 1672; An Answer to two Letters of T.B., etc., 1673. The occasional references to it in the theological literature of these times are indeed innumerable. Many affected to treat him as a mere buffoon—the concoctor, as one bitterly put it, of 'a pretty fardle of tales bundled together, and they have had the hap to fall into such hands as had rather lose a friend, not to say their country, than a jest.' ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... "Sibthorpe's conversion." Our nose grew pale with terror; our hump heaved with agitation. We thought there existed a greater genius than ourselves and that some one had discovered that Sibthorp could be converted into anything but a Member for Lincoln, and buffoon-in-waiting to the House of Commons. We found, however, that it alluded to a Reverend, and not to OUR Colonel. Really the newspaper people should be more careful. Such startling announcements are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... character. Shallow-minded people fancy Puritanism to be prosaic, because the laces and ruffles of the Cavaliers are a more picturesque costume at a masked ball than the dress of the Roundheads. The Puritan has become a grim and ugly scarecrow, on whom every buffoon may break his jest. But the genuine old Puritan spirit ceases to be picturesque only because of its sublimity: its poetry is sublimed into religion. The great poet of the Puritans fails, as far as he fails, when he tries to transcend the limits of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... tremendous, calm power, of invincible firmness, of cold and audacious courage. The very politeness with which he gave brief and precise answers seemed dangerous, on his lips, in his half bow. And if the prison garb looked upon the others like the ridiculous costume of a buffoon, upon him it was not noticeable, so foreign was it to his personality. And although the other terrorists had been seized with bombs and infernal machines upon them, and Werner had had but a black revolver, the judges for some reason ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... contemptuous and confident as they were about him, they are endeavouring to make terms with him, and it will probably end in his recovering the Great Seal. When this is done they will have consummated their disgrace. Sheil said, 'The difficulty is how to deal with a bully and a buffoon,' and as they have succumbed to and bargained with the one, now they are going to truckle to the other; there is not one of them who has scrupled to express his opinion of Brougham, but let us see if he really does come in or much indignation may be thrown away. The general opinion ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... still brandishing his fists. "She is not ill, but accursed! The baseness! The vileness! The devil himself could not have imagined anything more loathsome! She sent me off that she might run away with a buffoon, a dull-witted clown, an Alphonse! Oh God, better she had died! I cannot bear it! ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... sometimes chastise with words and blows the plebeian reformer; but he was often suffered in the Colonna palace to amuse the company with his threats and predictions; and the modern Brutus [25] was concealed under the mask of folly and the character of a buffoon. While they indulged their contempt, the restoration of the good estate, his favorite expression, was entertained among the people as a desirable, a possible, and at length as an approaching, event; and while all had the disposition to applaud, some ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... my bare rump."—Cf. in "Madame de Remusat," I., 108, one of his confessions to Talleyrand: he crudely points out in himself the distance between natural instinct and studied courage.—Here and elsewhere, we obtain a glimpse of the actor and even of the Italian buffoon; M. de Pradt called him "Jupiter Scapin." Read his reflections before M. de Pradt, on his return from Russia, in which he appears in the light of a comedian who, having played badly and failed in his part, retires behind the scenes, runs down the piece, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... misprint. "Khablas" in more places than one, now with a Sin, then with a Sad. Khalbas suggests "Khalbus," a buffoon, for which see vol. ii. 143. In Egypt, however, the latter generally ends in a Sad (see Lane's "Khalboos," M. E. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
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