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More "Travesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... buccaneering had been authorized by Judge Leeompte's court, the officials citing in their defense a presentment of his grand jury, declaring the free-State newspapers seditious publications, and the Free-State Hotel a rebellious fortification, and recommending their abatement as nuisances. The travesty of American government involved in the transaction is too serious for ridicule. In this incident, contrasting the creative and the destructive spirit of the factions, the Emigrant Aid Society of Massachusetts finds its most honorable ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... elegiac character; as is the case indeed with most productions of the common people.[2] The dialect itself, however, is far from being less adapted to the expression of the comic. There exists in it a travesty of the AEneid, written by J. Kotliarevski, a Kozak, which has found great favour throughout all Russia, although a foreigner is less able to appreciate its peculiarities and beauties; since indeed all poetic excellence of a comic description can be felt only by those who are familiar not only ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... a jackass-fool," Miss Stapylton said, crisply, "and a fortune-hunter, and a sot, and a travesty, and a whole heap of other things I haven't, as yet had time to look up in the dictionary. And I think—I think you call yourself an English gentleman? Well, all I have to say is God pity England if her gentlemen are of your stamp! There isn't a costermonger ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... and a man of extraordinary courage, audacity, resource, physical activity, industry, and wit. The real mystery is the problem why, at a mature age (forty-two) did d'Eon take upon him, and endure for forty years, the travesty of feminine array, which could only serve him as a source of notoriety—in short, as an advertisement? The answer probably is that, having early seized opportunity by the forelock, and having been obliged, after an extraordinary struggle, to leave his hold, he was ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... expression, are pleasure-toned because they are archaic and have once been well organized and habitual forms of activity having practical objects. But to say that men have a profound but concealed desire to kill one another, that the fighting impulse remains intact in some original animal form, is a travesty upon human nature. It is precisely because in war killing is depersonalized, so to speak, that it is a moral duty and is performed under conditions in which there is a summation of many strong motives leading to the act that, as we see it, men find joy in battle. The instinct of attack, or the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... respectable allegiance to the Homeric personality? To say nothing of a mystical admiration of the Greek hexameters which he could not construe, Colonel Prowley was a diligent reader of Pope's sonorous travesty. He felt like some simple believer in the divine right of kings, when the mob have broken into the palace, and stand in no awe of the stucco and red velvet. Yes, of course I admire original minds,—but then I love those which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing ...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which, since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the hearth a home for poetry, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... see, touch, hear, taste, and smell them; and by the psychologist, when he tells us that, in sensation, the external world is revealed as directly as it is possible that it could be revealed. But it is a travesty on this truth to say that we do not know things, but know only our sensations of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... original of Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet, had been succeeded in the rle by Lassalle, whose fine art in newer works had met with full recognition from press and public. To Lassalle's great surprise, his Hamlet, a remarkably fine performance within the limit set by the pitiable operatic travesty of Shakespeare's play, was received coldly, and there was wide comment on the circumstance that he had ignored traditions of performance, especially in the scene between the Prince and his mother. In considerable distress he went to Faure, who ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... same colossal egotism that would have sacrificed the mother on the altars of its vast conceit. He knew that Paul was grieving for himself, for lost sensations of pride, love and pleasure that he could never experience again. When the ludicrous travesty had partly spent itself, he stemmed the tide ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... morals. How could they comprehend that the taste was, like themselves, imported, and that its indulgence here did not characterize us? It was only in appearance that, while we did not enjoy the wit we delighted in the coarseness. And how coarse this travesty of the old fable mainly is! That priest Calchas, with his unspeakable snicker his avarice, his infidelity, his hypocrisy, is alone infamy enough to provoke the destruction of a city. Then that scene ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... are the springs of Georg and Kasimir, at which stand two charming maidens ready to fill your glasses. No conventional and hideous hat or bonnet disfigures the neat outline of their heads. No travesty of Berlin or Paris fashion burlesques their sturdy figures. Theirs the traditional costume of the Thuringian female peasant—a dark skirt, and white, short-sleeved chemisette, a blue apron and the daintiest of white silk kerchiefs, fringed sparsely and brocaded abundantly ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... to me I obtained an excellent view of him, and though I was later to become better acquainted with his kind, I may say that that single cursory examination of this awful travesty on Nature would have proved quite sufficient to my desires had I been a free agent. The fastest flier of the Heliumetic Navy could not quickly enough have carried me far from ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... latter has none of the curiosity, the seeking for experience, the active interest, the pliant expanding will, the sweet capacity for affection, friendship and love present in the average child. The cretin is a travesty on the human being in body, mind ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... those of Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men. The latter's first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... justice to him or his. He is a malefactor and nothing else. He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a "product of social conditions," save as a highwayman is "produced" by the fact than an unarmed man happens to have a purse. It is a travesty upon the great and holy names of liberty and freedom to permit them to be invoked in such a cause. No man or body of men preaching anarchistic doctrines should be allowed at large any more than if preaching the murder of some ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... king, had resolutely held himself aloof from the proceedings which, beginning on Saturday the 20th of January 1649, terminated so dismally on Tuesday the 30th. The strange part played by Lady Fairfax on the first day of the so-called trial (though it was no greater a travesty of justice than many a real trial both before and after) is one of the best-known stories in English history. There are several versions of it. Having provided herself with a seat in a small gallery in Westminster Hall, just above the heads ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... "When the name was a travesty, an ignominy, a reproach! When Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the representative of Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol? Yes; I descend, they say, from the Commneni; but I am far prouder that, on the other hand, I come from pure Athenians. I belong to two buried worlds. But ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... followed her son to his room. He is master of the house and yet he has never been possessor. Almost ten years ago it was being finished and furnished for the splendid woman in the opposite room, and by a strange travesty of fate he has brought her here to-day. But he has no time for retrospection. He hardly hears what his mother is saying as he stands his little girl on a chair by the ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... emphasis or it is forgotten under the propaganda. Besides, I don't believe in mating people like cattle or slaves. That's why this whole thing is a travesty of love and marriage. I hate being used to give it a semblance of scientific authenticity. I'm going to declare the top four contestants equal. They are, as far as I am concerned, genetically speaking. ...
— Mother America • Sam McClatchie
... travesty of his elder brother. He was shorter, but he wore enormously high boot-heels, which brought him to a fair stature. In figure he had none of that grace which marked the king, nor had he the elegant hand and foot which ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was this travesty of battle maintained. Then the Indian fire slackened, and finally ceased altogether. Believing the affair to be merely a temporary outbreak of a few hot-headed savages, that must quickly blow over, Gladwyn took advantage of this lull in ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... Monarch, the President of France, the King of the Belgians, the Kaiser (for the United States had not then entered the war), and, I think, some others, put in an appearance, each accompanied by his Paphian escort, his standard, and the appropriate national air. Apprehending that this symbolic travesty must, almost inevitably, end in a grand orgy of Yankee-Doodleism, I was impelled to flee the place before the thing should happen. Yet a horrid fascination held me there to watch the working up of "patriotic" sentiment by the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... any lady: mistress, etc., and follows the name, e.g. Fatimah Khatun. Habzalam Bazazah is supposed to be a fanciful compound, uncouth as the named; the first word consisting of "Habb" seed, grain; and "Zalam" of Zulmseed of tyranny. Can it be a travesty of "Absalom" (Ab Salam, father of peace)? Lane (ii. 284) and Payne (iii. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... on with your Poem? I have received the French of mine. Only think of being traduced into a foreign language in such an abominable travesty! It is useless to rail, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... to say it, and trust our readers will sympathize with the interest we take in the matter—it was indeed honest Jin Vin, who had been so far left to his own devices, and abandoned by his better angel, as occasionally to travesty himself in this fashion, and to visit, in the dress of a gallant of the day, those places of pleasure and dissipation, in which it would have been everlasting discredit to him to have been seen in his real character and condition; that is, had it been possible for him in his proper ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... recognized him likewise. He was something short of drunk, but his liquor was lively in him, and he wrenched his poor specter of a horse to a standstill. Upon his seat, padded hugely in his gown, he had a sort of throned look, a travesty of majesty; his whip ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... ideas—some of them very illiterate, some very delicate hair-splitting, some curious even to comicality,—gathered out of the writings of a certain number of men, who assuredly were not inspired, since they often travesty Scripture, and at times diametrically contradict it. Having lived in the darkest times of the Church, they were extremely ignorant and superstitious, even the best of them being enslaved by fancies as untrue in fact as they were unspiritual in tone. ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... he clearly and openly explained. "If a native failed to pay us our dues, we never sued him, but simply publicly seized some of his goods, sold them by auction, deducted our claim from the proceeds, and handed over to him the balance." There is something almost humorous in this travesty of an amende honorable for so ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... translate them. But the speech was along a line perfectly familiar to every woman since Eve. And Dorcas understood. She would have understood had Link voiced his proposal in the Choctaw dialect instead of a slurringly mumbled travesty ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... home, and saw 'Stunning Farce,' 'Roars of Laughter,' 'Good Old English Fun and Frolic,' placarded in vermilion letters on the gate. He went into the pit, and saw the lovely Mrs. Leary, as usual, in a man's attire; and that eminent buffo actor, Tom Horseman, dressed as a woman. Horseman's travesty seemed to him a horrid and hideous degradation; Mrs. Leary's glances and ankles had not the least effect. He laughed again, and bitterly, to himself, as he thought of the effect which she had produced upon him, on the first ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... young could have held firm in face of such dejection, only eyes as alert and wakeful as those of this wayfaring boy could possibly have looked undaunted at the shabby streets with their flaunting travesty of joy exhibited in the dripping awnings of the deserted cafes, that offered Biere, Billard, and yet again Biere to ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... his celebrity, the inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaides" that was making a furor—a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Academie Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds; and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... us at this, and we all trooped into the house again. The little girl had crowed and clapped her hands during our struggle, all unconscious of the dreadful event of which it was a juvenile travesty. We two boys admired her as she was borne in on the ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in the midst of fashion and external show. ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... tales. The characters do not do what they ought to do, nor what they would do, nor it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. "Then, resuming his usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew," does perhaps reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to be found in any other branch of art, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... the new dissipation, which carried Carl away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... fable, Trove has scarcely ever reduced demi-god or hero to more fantastic plight than was this travesty of the great Henry. After dinner Madame de Traigny led her fair guest about the castle to show her the various points of view. At one window she paused, saying that it commanded ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that the hump atop each rounded body was a travesty of a head, hairless, and without a neck. Their features were particularly hideous, and I shall pass over a description ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... hot August day, one of the last of glorious Fructidor, had begun to wane, and the shades of evening to slowly creep into the long, bare room where this travesty of justice ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... from the hymnals with its tune. Is it because profane people or thoughtless youth made a travesty of the two ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... which, although inferior to ours, is far better than that at Amsterdam, while it converts The Hague's Zoo into a travesty. Last spring the lions were in splendid condition. They are well housed, but fewer distractions are provided for them than in Regent's Park. I found myself fascinated by the herons, who were continually soaring out over the neighbouring houses ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Fourth of July procession, which in the old days had seemed so funny, so exciting to me. I laughed no more. It filled me with bitterness to think that such a makeshift spectacle could amuse anyone. "How dull and eventless life must be to enable such a pitiful travesty to attract and hold the attention of girls like Ella and Flora," I thought as I saw them standing with their little sister to watch ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... making its delicate rhythms fit into those of a dance, has a variety and sublimity of meaning so far transcending the personality of any human being, that to attempt to focus it in a dancer, no matter how charming, would be a travesty. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... often this "moral" is tagged on at the bottom, and the reader, not knowing that it is the key of the whole thing and the only important paragraph in the article, tranquilly turns up his nose at it and leaves it unread. One can deliver a satire with telling force through the insidious medium of a travesty, if he is careful not to overwhelm the satire with the extraneous interest of the travesty, and so bury it from the reader's sight and leave him a joked and defrauded victim, when the honest intent was to add to either his knowledge or his wisdom. I have had a deal of experience ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Maggard he had fled from Virginia, where, with the juries packed against him, justice would have been a travesty. In self-defense his sister had killed her husband, and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... egotism, that sad travesty of personal interest, appears under a form quite as formidable when the general interest takes the form of communism. The cooeperation of personal interest and of the general interest is always necessary, both for individual profit and social advantage. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... incidents and persons of domestic life; out of the stuff of which they made their emperors, their heroes, and their princesses, they cut out a pompous country justice, a hectoring tailor, or an impudent mantua-maker; but it was not merely this travesty of great personages, nor the lofty effusions of one in a lowly station, which terminated the object of parody. It was designed for a higher object, that of more obviously exposing the original for any absurdity in its scenes, or in its catastrophe, and dissecting its faulty characters; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... not uncommon today and are of two different kinds. First, there is the burlesque that is travesty, which takes a well-known and often serious subject and hits off its famous features in ways that are uproariously funny. "When Caesar Sees Her," took the famous meeting between Cleopatra and Marc Antony and made even the most impressive moment a ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... a travesty on running, to be sure, but it was the best he could do. He staggered and stumbled; he lurched rapidly ahead for a little space and then moved with halting steps. His limbs grew weak, his breath came in gasps, and the pain in his side was cutting ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... the long line of more sober folk, the older fisherman, the women in caps and many-hued skirts, the serious townfolk who had scorned the travesty, yet would not be left out of the procession. They all began to march, to the tune of those noisy brass trumpets which were thundering forth snatches from the ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... invented to travesty the truth, and when French politicians say they are going to the right it is an almost sure sign that they are going to the left; nevertheless, is it possible to blame the Italians who read in these assurances a positive promise ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... on a platform receiving the respect of attention, marching with her fellows under common conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She had on her arm a sheaf of the War Cry. This was another ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... first," says a quaint German mystic, speaking of "the mystery of so-called white things," as being "ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal." So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should be [14] nights ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... he said briefly, as he turned into a travesty of a front yard and halted beside a small cabin, built of logs and containing not more than three or ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... every instance surrounded the giving or the taking of a name, it hardly seems appropriate that Indian names should be assumed even for a short period without some regard being shown to the customs and thought of the people from whom the names are borrowed. While there should be no travesty of rites such as those that have been here described, rites that have been held sacred upon this continent for untold generations, still it would not be unseemly to hold to the spirit of those rites when we borrow these ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... Whilst that travesty of a trial was going on, and every suggestion in favour of the accused was being trampled on, and every one of the chartered liars who had sworn falsely for the honour of the army was being bolstered by the authority of the court, I had many opportunities for conversation with ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... suffered before. George Ramsey was her first love; the others had been merely childish playthings. She was strangling love, and that is a desperate deed, and the strangler suffers more than love. Maria, with the memory of that marriage which was, indeed, no marriage, but the absurd travesty of one, upon her, was in almost a suicidal frame of mind. She knew perfectly well that if it had not been for that marriage secret which she held always in mind, that George Ramsey would continue to call, that they would become engaged, that her life might be like other women's. And now he was ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... presentment is less studied, or its professors are less capable than was once the case. And perhaps burlesque has exposed too glaringly its ridiculous or seamy side. It was not one of those things that could long endure the assaults of travesty. The spell was potent enough in its way, but it dissolved when once interruptive laughter became generally audible. A creature of theatrical tradition, curiously sophisticated and enveloped in absurdities, its long survival is perhaps more surprising ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... magicians and astrologers who had been brought from Italy, and that the black art alone was responsible for her success. These accusations finally aroused such public hostility that, after a trial which was a travesty upon justice, Eleanora was soon condemned to death, on the charge of having unduly influenced the queen by means of magic philters. Eleanora went to her death bravely, saying with dignity to her accusers: "The philter which I have used is the ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... He knew that popular Christianity was a disfigurement of truth. He knew that the theological claptrap which the Church, with such oracular assurance, such indubitable certainty and gross assumption of superhuman knowledge, handed out to a suffering world, was a travesty of the divinely simple teachings of Jesus, and that it had estranged mankind from their only visible source of salvation, the Bible. He saw more clearly than ever before that in the actual achievements of popular theology there had been ridiculously little that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... evidently at some remote period, been sculptured out of a solid block of black marble seemingly springing vertically out of the ground. There was nothing artistic in the conception or execution of the image, which was a mere travesty of the human figure, every member being absurdly out of proportion, while the only features upon the modelling of which any pains had been taken were those of the face, the expression of which hideously suggested the extremes of mingled cunning and ferocity. An altar of the same black marble, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... or their equivalent are useless in Social discussion. Social phenomena do not lend themselves to the rigorous formulas of mathematics and logic, for the human intellect is unable to discern and grasp all the factors of these problems. My travesty of Plato was intended to illustrate the difficulty of close reasoning on ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... ex-drayman, now colonel of horse—to the door of the House of Commons, who arrested the more faithful and moderate members, imposed himself and his rebel crew upon the House, and hurried on that violation of constitutional law, that travesty of justice, which compelled an anointed King to stand before the lowest of his subjects—the jacks-in-office of a mutinous commonalty—to answer for having fought in defence of his ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... enough, an almost total lack of resentment amongst the victims consigned here by an infamous travesty of justice. Madame Akimova, for instance, a plain but homely-looking person, seemed devoted to the care of her miserable little household to the exclusion of all mundane matters. I sometimes wondered, as I sat in her hut, and watched the pale, patient little woman clad in rusty black ceaselessly ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... date of the travesty known to us, and most popular amongst our mediaeval ancestors, it might be shown that some rude notion of Homer's fable and personages had crept into ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... force and ability—though evidently also as narrow-minded and unfair as only a bigot can be. All through the examination that ensued he took a leading part, and with him, to be accused was to be set down at once as guilty. Never, among either Christian or heathen people, was there a greater travesty of justice than these examinations and trials for witchcraft, conducted by the very foremost men of ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... equally audacious is a more recent travesty of the well-known scene in Dante's Inferno where Bertrand de Born, a noted sower of sedition, comes forth with his severed head in his hands. In the Russian version the renowned editor of the Moscow Gazette is seen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... is part of him, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, for she eats what comes from his table, and, being fed of one flesh, are they not brother and sister to one another in virtue of community of nutriment, which is but a thinly veiled travesty of descent? When she eats peas with her knife, he does so too; there is not a bit of bread and butter she puts into her mouth, nor a lump of sugar she drops into her tea, but he knoweth it altogether, though he knows nothing whatever about it. She is en-Croesused and he en-scullery-maided so long ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... were earnest in their distractions," observed Deppingham, with a glance at his wife's eager face. "This could be nothing more than a travesty, a jest." ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... Suicides, murderers, and spirits of murdered people, are all apt to haunt houses. The sprites occasionally appear in their proper form, but just as often in disguise: a demon, too, can appear in human shape if so disposed: demons being of their nature deceitful and fond of travesty, as Porphyry teaches us and as Law (1680) illustrates. Whether the spirits of the dead quite know what they are about when they take to haunting, is, in the opinion of Thyraeus, a difficult question. Thomas Aquinas, following St. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Lords, in solemn arraignment of the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible laughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of this strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression; and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughter gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... do any such foolishness as that!" broke in the tragic actor. "I have demeaned myself enough already in this farce and travesty of acting, and to jump into a haymow—ye gods! Never!" and ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... the colour of her chintz dress, thus producing what the French term "une gamme de couleur," most pleasing to the eye, and with never a false note in it. Beside these comely, amply breasted bronze statues, the British West Indian negress, with her absurd travesty of European fashions, and her grotesque hats, cuts, I am bound to say, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... sight. The shaven-headed, clay-faced pirate looming so high and so huge in the doorway that he filled it altogether, his clothes torn, filthy and stained from the battle and from careless weeks at sea. His companion was a travesty of his onetime elegance, dirty lace ruffles spotted by forgotten meals, his velvet coat marked by chairbacks and soiled from months of constant wear, his hair unwashed and sleazily caught back, no longer curled with a fine exactitude. Both men had been housed together ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... almost a travesty to call a trial the proceedings which began early in December and dragged along until the twenty-sixth. Rizal was defended by a young Spanish officer selected by him from among a number designated by the tribunal, who chivalrously ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... he went from place to place, and did not fear to return to Rome in the travesty of a pilgrim. The story of his adventures would fill many pages, but Rome is not concerned with them. In vain he appealed to adventurers, to enthusiasts, and to fanatics to help in regaining what he had lost. None would listen to him, no man would draw the sword. He came ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... very stormy weather the mail guard would prop up the lid of his imperial and get inside for shelter. On one occasion when the mail arrived at Liverpool the guard was found imprisoned in his letter-box. The lid had fallen and fastened in the male travesty of "Ginevra." Fortunately for him it was a burlesque and not a tragedy. Bags thrown to the guards at wayside stations not unfrequently got under the wheels of the train and the contents were cut to pieces. On one occasion, on the Grand Junction, an engine failed through the fire-bars ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... Belgians protested that it was a travesty of the intentions of the French Government to interpret them in that sense, and to let oneself be misled as to the sentiments of the French nation by the ebullitions of a few irresponsible spirits or the intrigues ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... confinement within doors, of insufficient food, of waning hope—had come over Desiree. She listened heedlessly to the sounds in the streets through which the dead were passing to the Oliva Gate, while the living danced by in their hideous travesty of rejoicing. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... a sad travesty that the mother country should send succor too late. A French vessel, with emigrants and supplies, came in sight only to fall into the hands ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... succeed. The poverty of his wit is thus enriched by his complacency in dealing it out. His part indeed amply pays its way, in showing how much of mirth may be caused by feebleness in a great attempt at a small matter. Besides, in him the mother element of the whole piece runs out into broad humour and travesty; his reasons for breaking with his master the Jew being, as it were, a variation in drollery upon the fundamental air of the play. Thus he exhibits under a comic form the general aspect of surrounding humanity; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... version in English. Some of these songs were transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in repetition. It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe's mission ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... man, with an eye to the bizarre, to whom Dennis had presented some of his characteristic enterprises, had put the young Irishman in the way of securing a biography of the Hebrew premier, whom he provided with such an absurd travesty of likeness, and the "ole clo' merchant" was so impressed by the resolution and dexterity of the celebrated statesman, that he became, from that moment, the prey of a consuming ambition whose direction he ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... at the window together, amused at the figure Mungo presented as with an odd travesty of the soldier's strategy, and all unseen as he fancied, he chased a fowl round the narrow confines of the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... In the foreground, where a solitary Indian stood motionless, waiting, there was being repeated the same puerile pantomime and horse-play of a former occasion. At intervals, from the rear, sounded the war whoop travesty. It was all the same as that afternoon eighteen days before, when the girl had left, similar even to the cloud of black smoke in the distance lifting lazily into the sky; only now the trail, instead of growing thinner and lighter, became denser and blacker minute by minute. In sympathy, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... What must be, must be. If you are afraid of tragedy, you ought never to have joined me in starting upon such a story. Even what has never happened must be made to seem actual to be successful. The art of fiction is to imitate truth with absolute fidelity, not to travesty it. In such circumstances the man's love ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... to the first example, and more fully worked out. In spite of incongruous masque or rather pantomime scenes the pervading atmosphere is sustained. One would say that Purcell got his inspiration by reading of Prospero's magic island, and never thought of Shadwell's stupid and boorish travesty. ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... self-conscious. Shall we have, then, no refined characters on the stage? Yes; but let them be taken by men and women of taste and refinement and let us have done with this masquerading in false raiment, ancient and modern, which makes nearly every stage a travesty of nature and the whole theatre a painful pretension. We do not expect the modern theatre to be a place of instruction (that business is now turned over to the telegraphic operator, who is making a new language), but it may give amusement instead ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Strand, but I did not put up my umbrella. The truth is I couldn't put up my umbrella. The frame would not work for one thing, and if it had worked, I would not have put the thing up, for I would no more be seen under such a travesty of an umbrella than Falstaff would be seen marching through Coventry with his regiment of ragamuffins. The fact is, the umbrella is not my umbrella at all. It is the umbrella of some person who I hope will read these lines. He has got my silk umbrella. I have got the cotton ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... mankind, to angelic eyes, So, through the scenes of life below, In life's ironical disguise, A travesty ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fireproof curtain may be lowered here in accordance with the County Council regulations; moving portraits of deceased, and living dramatic critics can be thrown without risk of ignition on the curtain by magic lantern. The point of this travesty will be entirely lost to those who have not read 'Man and Superman.' It is the first masterpiece in the English literature of the twentieth century. It is also necessary to have read the dramatic criticisms in the daily press, and ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... to travesty the truth, and I was impotent—the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... the dint of much pushing had been put into Camberton just before the final smash and the exile. In the hall of the college there hung a portrait of his great grandfather in his black preacher's robes; of this, Roper Ellwell, second, was a weak travesty. The thin features had been blurred in the process of transmitting; an inclination to flabby stoutness of person made the young man portly, where the old minister had been nervously fragile. But Roper Ellwell, second, rarely compared notes, for he dined, not in hall under this picture, ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... bad air. To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking, and count it the most ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the room told him that his brothers were awake and watching him, though the monk still snored on in his stertorous fashion. One after the other the pair stole from their beds and looked for a moment at this skilful travesty of nature's handiwork, and both nodded in token of approval ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... to discuss my writings at a party and to pronounce an opinion upon them. He said that I wrote many things which I did not believe, and then stood aside, and was amused in a humorous mood to see that other people believed them. It would be absurd to be, or even to feel, indignant at such a travesty of my purpose as this, and indeed I think that one is never very indignant at misrepresentation unless one's mind accuses itself of its being true ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a leading Sunday newspaper in the spring of 1919, signalized by this amazing travesty of the actual facts. In a reference to our land forces of the early days of the struggle, the writer spoke of "armies sent to war lacking almost every modern requisite." Now, the Press generally manages to avoid grossly false statements of that kind ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was deliberately ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... verge of the grave. It is a curious satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan, commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... they were simply required to report afterward! Only members of the Bolshevik party were immune from this terror. Alminsky, a Bolshevist writer of note, felt called upon to protest against this hideous travesty of democratic justice, and ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... ludicrous that these industrials now do their little drama of the war-dance and the oration and the council-smoke. That drama has degenerated into a very feeble farce now, and the actors in it would be quite outdone in their travesty by any average corps of "supes" at one of our theatres. By-and-by all this will have died out, and the "Indian side" of the stream at Lorette will be assimilated in all its features to the other. The moccason is already typifying the decadence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... umbrella from the thunderbolts of Zeus. And they must have felt instinctively what only a laborious erudition reveals to us, the sudden subtle modulations of the colloquial comic verse into mock-heroic travesty of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... War.—It is a travesty on human progress, a social paradox, that war and science go hand in hand. On one side are all of the machines of destruction, the battleships, bombing-planes, huge guns, high explosives, and poisonous gases, products of scientific experiment and inventive genius, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant aspects. The great success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, "Patience," produced in 1881, was also to some extent due to the humorous allusions to the extravagances of the "Aesthetetes." In support of what may be termed ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... the art of singing is in its decadence, that soon there would not be one artist left fitted to deliver vocal music in public. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort in 1825 for he found the great Catalani but a sorry travesty of his early favourites, Pacchierotti and Banti. I protest against this misconception. Any one who asserts that there are laws which govern singing, physical, scientific laws, must pay court to other ears than mine. I have heard ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Caine could have given no more conclusive proof of his courage and his earnestness of purpose than in selecting as the motif of this book that outrage upon justice, that travesty on morality; the condemnation of woman for a crime that is readily ignored or as readily forgiven in man. It is really such an outworn theme that the very mention of it is greeted with smiles or supercilious shrugs, and even lovers of their kind have grown apologetic about it. If any man like John ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... external government and law, it is the antithesis of Mr. Carpenter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that external government, animated by the general will of a social democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively accountable to an alert and intelligent public opinion, will ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... course, impossible to enumerate the various items, and it would not be meet that the attempt should be made here. It will be enough to say that among the many interesting numbers was the first portion of an unpublished travesty on "Othello," written in 1833, before the first published "Boz" sketch, and a hitherto unknown (to experts) page of "Pickwick," this one fragment being valued, says the catalogue, at L150 sterling. First editions, portraits, oil paintings, ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... note was struck by editorials, many of them couched in language even stronger and more suited to fan the public rage. The recent trial was called an outrageous travesty on justice; attention was directed to the damnable vagaries of recent juries which had been impaneled to try red-handed ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... many years. He was the son of a Virginian Loyalist, and a Tory of extreme views, calm, polished, and judicial in his demeanour. But whatever his opinions on the questions of the day he was too discreet a politician and too honest a judge ever to have descended to such a travesty of justice as had been shown by his predecessor in the case of Gourlay. His influence, however was never in the direction of liberal measures. He opposed responsible government and the union of the two provinces, both when ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... tricked out in colored kerchiefs, ribands, and flowers, and on her part could contrive the most fantastic costumes for them. So soon as she saw Hermas with the helmet on, the fancy seized her to carry through the travesty he had begun. She eagerly and in perfect innocence pulled the coat of armor straight, helped him to buckle the breastplate and to fasten on the sword, and as she performed the task, at which Hermas proved himself unskilful enough, her gay and pleasant ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... keeping are the lives of many persons, and any wavering or unsteadiness, on his part, may lead to speedy disaster. Somewhere along the way between the ages of six and twenty-six he must gain the ability to assume a heavy responsibility, and it would seem a travesty upon rational education to force him to acquire this ability wholly during the eight years succeeding his school experience. If, at the age of eighteen, he does not exhibit some ability in this respect, the school may justly ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... indicated, adding singularity. The half-recumbent figure by the Duke's side, is of rare pathos and beauty. Almost angelic in its resignation and religious fervour is the upturned face. The drapery, too, shows classic grace and simplicity, as strongly contrasted with the martial travesty opposite as are ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... closely allied. They appear like actors or masqueraders dressed up and painted for amusement, or like swindlers endeavouring to pass themselves off for well-known and respectable members of society. What is the meaning of this strange travesty? Does nature descend to imposture or masquerade? We answer, she does not. Her principles are too severe. There is a use in every detail of her handiwork. The resemblance of one animal to another is of exactly the same essential nature as the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... become for much that is mean and degrading. For example, when I was riding from Bloemfontein to Kimberley I and my companion descried a farmhouse two miles in front of us near Koodoesrand Drift; when we had come within about a mile of it a little travesty of a Union Jack was run up on a stick, and when we rode up to the door a farmer came out, smiling, rubbing his hands, sniggering—in a word, truckling. His talk was like the political swagger of the music-hall or the ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... the closet for dresses, cloaks, and artificial flowers; Brigitte, as usual, was patient and cheerful. We both arranged a sort of travesty; she wished to dress my hair herself; we painted and powdered ourselves freely; all that we lacked was found in an old chest that had belonged, I believe, to the aunt. In an hour we could not recognize each other. The evening passed in singing, ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... whom he had loved long ago and who had died. Since her death he had put aside love as a passion. Now and then—not often—a sort of travesty of love had come to him, the spectre of the real. It is difficult for a young, strong man in the pride of his life never to have any dealing either with love or with its spectre. But Isaacson was right. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... her, and a man stooped over Dylks and voided a mouthful of tobacco juice in his face; another lashed him on the head with a switch of leatherwood: all in a squalid travesty of the supreme tragedy of the race. As if a consciousness of the semblance touched the gospel-read actors in the drama, they shrank in turn from what they had done, and lost ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... of adapting it to a modern and English treatment of its topics. Caesar, upon this system, becomes George the Second—a very strange sort of Caesar; and Pope is supposed to have been laughing at him, which may be the color that Pope gave to the travesty amongst his private circle; otherwise there is nothing in the expressions to sustain such a construction. Rome, with a little more propriety, masquerades as England, and France as Greece, or, more strictly, as Athens. Now, by such a transformation, already from the very beginning Pope was preparing ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... him back; so, apparently, was the chaffinch. He started, craned his neck, and regarded his adversary first with one eye then with the other. "What, rags and tatters, back again so soon!" I seem to hear him say. "You miserable travesty of a bird, scarcely fit for a weasel to dine on! Your presence is an insult to us, but I'll soon settle you. You'll feel the cold on the other, side of the wall when I've knocked off a few more of ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... "Ms wa Mzi," the latter wordvexatious, troublesome. [I notice that in the MS. the name is distinctly and I believe purposely spelt with Hamzah above the Ww and Kasrah beneath the Sn, reading "Muus." It is, therefore, a travesty of the name Ms, and the exact counterpart of "Muhsin", being the active participle of "asa", 4th form of "sa,"he did evil, he injured, and nearly equivalent with the following "Muuz." The two names may perhaps be rendered: Muhsin, the Beneficent, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Newman (leaving the past tense for the moment) seems to be that he sacrificed his intellect, that out of weariness he threw himself into the Catholic fold. Such may be a true account of some conversions, but it is a pitiable travesty of the facts in the case of Newman. Newman went into the Church because it seemed rational to him to do so; and it is still the great question, whether once assuming certain fundamental ideas held by Protestant ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... silence. Thoroughly piqued, Herod turned from insulting questions to acts of malignant derision. He and his men-at-arms made sport of the suffering Christ, "set him at nought and mocked him"; then in travesty they "arrayed him in a gorgeous robe and sent him again to Pilate."[1289] Herod had found nothing ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... "the half is not told") sounds to the unobservant like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the principles of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no element of exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great strike or lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious and undisputed, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... was no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; but ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... and they had taken a wonderful trip together. But always there had seemed to be Mark Carter, her old friend and playmate, in the background. Now, suddenly he seemed to be removed to indefinite distances. It was as if she were looking at a picture that purported to be her friend, yet seemed a travesty, like one wearing a mask. She stood in the sunlight looking at him, in her quaint little cap and a long white enveloping house apron, and she seemed to him like a haloed saint. Something like worship shone in his eyes, but he kept the mask down, and looked at her with ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... Desperate Inoperative Benevolent Voluntary Offend Enumerate Dilapidate Request Exquisite Exonerate Approximate Insinuate Resurgence Insurrection Rapture Exasperate Complacent Dimension Commensurate Preclude Cloister Turnpike Travesty Atone Incarnate Charnal Etiquette Rejuvenate Eradicate Quiet Requiem Acquiesce Ambidextrous Inoculate Divulge Proper Appropriate Omnivorous Voracious Devour Escritoire Mordant Remorse Miser Hilarious Exhilarate Rudiment Erudite Mark Marquis Libel Libretto Vague Vagabond ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... with an eye to the bizarre, to whom Dennis had presented some of his characteristic enterprises, had put the young Irishman in the way of securing a biography of the Hebrew premier, whom he provided with such an absurd travesty of likeness, and the "ole clo' merchant" was so impressed by the resolution and dexterity of the celebrated statesman, that he became, from that moment, the prey of a consuming ambition whose direction he could ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... raids. "Surely," writes one of our correspondents, "it is a scandal that, at this time in the world's history, some cellars should be totally destitute of wine. That there should be no coal in the coal-cellars is understandable enough; but to ask the timid public into empty wine cellars is a travesty of hospitality." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... the mother on the altars of its vast conceit. He knew that Paul was grieving for himself, for lost sensations of pride, love and pleasure that he could never experience again. When the ludicrous travesty had partly spent itself, he stemmed the tide ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... while differing utterly in his tone of mind, and his attitude toward the mediaeval stories, from that of the mediaeval artists and sculptors,—whose gargoyles and other grotesques were carved without a thought of travesty on anything religious,—he is at one with them in combining extreme irreverence of form with a total lack of irreverence of spirit toward the real spiritual mysteries of religion. He burlesques saints and devils alike, mocks the swarm of miracles of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... times, at this period of his celebrity, the inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaides" that was making a furor—a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Academie Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds; and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it is ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... redoubled their travesty of merriment. They voiced the gossip of a vanished society; the politics, fashions, and scandals of old Florence. One heard the names of noble families long since extinct, accounts of historic escapades related as if they had happened yesterday. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... half-way to the bateau did Carrigan dare to glance back over his shoulder at the man who was paddling, to see what effect the fistic travesty had left on him. He was a big-mouthed, clear-eyed, powerfully-muscled fellow, and he was grinning ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... beginning on Saturday the 20th of January 1649, terminated so dismally on Tuesday the 30th. The strange part played by Lady Fairfax on the first day of the so-called trial (though it was no greater a travesty of justice than many a real trial both before and after) is one of the best-known stories in English history. There are several versions of it. Having provided herself with a seat in a small gallery in Westminster Hall, just above the heads of the judges, when her husband's name was called ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Sambourne's most ingenious pen has been all too seldom employed on children's books. Indeed, one that comes first to memory, the "New Sandford and Merton" (1872), is hardly entitled to be classed among them, but the travesty of the somewhat pedantic narrative, interspersed with fairly amusing anecdotes, that Thomas Day published in 1783, is superb. No matter how familiar it may be, it is simply impossible to avoid laughing anew at the smug little ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... incredibly committed. That to have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "But I don't admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the minds of all witnesses ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ceremony already performed there. But it would hardly be a reason for commemorating her extortion of privileges in which the inhabitants of Southam did not share; and it would leave the black lady unexplained. She may, indeed, have been a mere travesty, though the hypothesis would be anything but free from difficulty. Here, again, if we have recourse to the comparison of ceremonies, we may obtain some light. Among the tribes of the Gold Coast of Africa the wives of men who have gone to war make a daily procession through ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... quaintly weird, so boisterous and yet so full of melancholy? The composer has sought to catch them, has touched them with his refining art and has spoiled them. The playwright has striven to transfer from the field to the stage a cotton-picking scene and has made a travesty of it. To transfer the passions of man and to music-riddle them is an art with stiff-jointed rules, but the charm of a cotton-picking scene is an essence, and is breathed but cannot be caught. Here seems to lie a sentiment that no other labor invites, and though old ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... of the girl whom he had loved long ago and who had died. Since her death he had put aside love as a passion. Now and then—not often—a sort of travesty of love had come to him, the spectre of the real. It is difficult for a young, strong man in the pride of his life never to have any dealing either with love or with its spectre. But Isaacson was ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... that he had compassed the death of the infant prince by charms and incantations. Two of the Fujiwara nobles were appointed to investigate the accusation, and they condemned the prince to die by his own hand. He committed suicide, and his wife and children died with him. The travesty of justice was carefully acted throughout. A proclamation was issued promising capital punishment to any one, of whatever rank or position, who compassed the death or injury of another by spells or incantations, and, six months ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... its votaries cannot destroy her, nor put an end to her charmed life, they hope, at least, to defame her character and to blacken her reputation. They seize every opportunity to misrepresent her doctrine, to travesty her history, and to denounce her as retrograde, old fashioned, and out of date. And, what makes matters worse, the falsest and most mischievous allegations are often accompanied by professions of friendship and consideration, and set ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... diseases"—it can be readily seen in what a brainless way some "nerve specialists" classify patients of this kind. Not knowing the constituents of the nerve-cells, they still attempt to prescribe for neurasthenic patients. The results are in accordance with such travesty of treatment. The increase in the number of Insane Asylums gives, or should give, a true picture of existing conditions. What is needed is a little more knowledge of physiological chemistry, but as it is too much to expect of the ordinary so-called "nerve specialist" to be familiar ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... vanished from the hymnals with its tune. Is it because profane people or thoughtless youth made a travesty of the two ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... which Nature seems deliberately to equip her more favoured female children at this age, as if to challenge the other sex to a definite attitude immediately. A quivering freshness—the "bloom" of the poets—gave a soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was a trifle smaller than her sister, she was broad across the shoulders, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... uncouth barbarians. Their manners and customs, while lively and unconventional, are most charming. Their dress is graceful and practical, not grotesque; their soft speech is pleasing to the ear. Their flag is the original flag of the Republic of Texas; it is definitely not a barbaric travesty of our own emblem. And the underlying premises of their political system should, as far as possible, be incorporated into the organization of the Solar League. Here politics is an exciting and exacting game, in which ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... Salonika, he tells me that, so far, the occupation has been a travesty of any military operation. No plan; no administration; much confusion; troops immobile and likely to sit for weeks upon the beach. The Balkan States Intelligence Officers are on the spot and grasp the inferences. Until the troops landed they ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... that I could not have known my departed relation did not prevent two of my cousins, elderly maiden ladies who had had that privilege, from writing to me in great indignation at my having ventured to travesty my old aunt. They had found me out (I am always being found out), and the vials of their wrath were poured out ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... is clearly a travesty. 'Mrs. Borrow was devoted to her husband, and looked after business matters; and he always treated her with exceeding kindness,' is the verdict of Miss Elizabeth Jay, who was frequently privileged to visit the husband and ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... five-franc piece. It was the first coin he found in his pocket, and the sight of it caused a frown. Confound those Montmartre playwrights! Why was their stupid travesty constantly recurring to his mind? He frowned again, this time at Auguste Comte's smugness, and looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes to seven! It was too late now to do other than write—if he succeeded. If not—ah, well! "Some of them are slain in the flower of their youth." At least, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... propos of the prevailing epidemic, writes,—"Sir, there must have been an epidemic of influenza at Cambridge about thirty-three years ago, as in a travesty of Faust, produced at the A. D. C. about that time, occurs a parody of the song 'Di Frienza' from La Traviata, commencing 'Influenza is about, So I'll stay no longer out.' History ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... now, that the hump atop each rounded body was a travesty of a head, hairless, and without a neck. Their features were particularly hideous, and I shall pass over a description as ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... said briefly, as he turned into a travesty of a front yard and halted beside a small cabin, built of logs and containing not more than three ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... and nothing else.' That is all there is of it. Of what particular use it is as a bill, practically, is more than I can tell. I presume the Honorable Senator from Massachusetts will very easily explain it, but it reminds me (I say it with all due respect to him) of a political travesty of a law argument by an eminent lawyer of his own State, running somewhat ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was deliberately undertaken ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... He had been, I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; but it ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... inquiries at Mr. Tremaine's,—Bertie, who was as good a mimic as his mother, enhancing the fright of his fair companion by an improvisation of the scene that would probably take place supposing they were too late to prevent it, and further convulsing her with a travesty of his brother-in-law in his most imposing ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... this daffodil was as cunning as he. He had done what he had, badly of course he could not do otherwise—a foredained failure such as he—bungled it hopelessly; but the idea was the same—a bad travesty of a bad idea, badly worked out. For a moment her mind glanced aside from the main issue in disgust and contempt for the method. It was sin without genius, a puerile theft without adequate return, a miserable fall, and for such a purpose! To expect to find ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... situation, Now the curtain comes down from above On the end of our little flirtation— A travesty romance; for Love, If he climbed in disguise to your lattice, Fell dead of the first kisses' pain: But one thing is left us now; that is— Begin ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... spokesman—one Pride, an ex-drayman, now colonel of horse—to the door of the House of Commons, who arrested the more faithful and moderate members, imposed himself and his rebel crew upon the House, and hurried on that violation of constitutional law, that travesty of justice, which compelled an anointed King to stand before the lowest of his subjects—the jacks-in-office of a mutinous commonalty—to answer for having fought in defence ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... you ought never to have joined me in starting upon such a story. Even what has never happened must be made to seem actual to be successful. The art of fiction is to imitate truth with absolute fidelity, not to travesty it. In such circumstances the man's love would be ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... what you require at my hands," returned he, passionately. "You do not know how an ill-timed pause or a slighted rest would mar the fair face of my godlike music, and travesty its beauty." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... describes the new dissipation, which carried Carl away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, while Gretchen ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... art of singing is in its decadence, that soon there would not be one artist left fitted to deliver vocal music in public. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort in 1825 for he found the great Catalani but a sorry travesty of his early favourites, Pacchierotti and Banti. I protest against this misconception. Any one who asserts that there are laws which govern singing, physical, scientific laws, must pay court to other ears than mine. I have heard this same man for twenty years shouting in the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... arisen out of the inconveniences and reasonable fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the eighteenth century was a dangerous political muddle, uncertain of her monarchy, her policy, her affinities. She ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... While their lips were being moistened by the stream of gold, they were, as a matter of fact, drinking the transformed flesh and blood of the heroes who had sacrificed themselves on the French battlefields, and in this infamous travesty of the Christian mystery of the Lord's Supper the devil himself took part and possession of them. They followed new customs, new views of life, other ideals. The motto of their noisy and obtrusive life seemed to be, "Get rich as quickly and with as little trouble as possible, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... engagement. The opera of Thomas had rendered the public familiar with the personage of the hero, and the magnates of the Grand Opera came to the Salle Ventadour to study this new and forcible presentment of the baritone prince, who wails and warbles through the operatic travesty of Shakespeare's masterpiece. That the impersonation will prove wholly acceptable to all Shakespearian critics in England or America is extremely doubtful. For the Hamlet of Rossi is mad—undeniably, unmistakably mad—from the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... see him no more. I shall see him no more," she said to herself, twisting her hands. What a travesty, what a mockery that one hurried moment had been! What a parting that was no parting! He had no heart. He did not ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... each saddle, and on it was seated wife, daughter, or perhaps a young child—I should like to have seen the church-going dames perched up proudly in all their Sunday finery, masked in black velvet, a sober Puritan travesty of a gay carnival fashion. Riding-habits were hardly known until a century ago, and even after their introduction were never worn a-pillion-riding, so the Puritan women rode in their best attire. Sometimes, in unusually muddy ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... earnest in their distractions," observed Deppingham, with a glance at his wife's eager face. "This could be nothing more than a travesty, ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... which the mission of Christ teaches us about the love of God is that it is a love which takes note of and overcomes man's sin. I have said, as plainly as I can, that I reject the travesty of Christianity which implies that it was Christ's mission which originated God's love to men. But a love that does not in the slightest degree care whether its object is good or bad—what sort of a love do you call that? What do you name it when a father shows it to his children? Moral ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... his soul in prayer that his cup might pass, stands forth as the one calm and undisturbed actor among all those who took part in the tragic doings of that day. His judges and foes were all swayed by passion and self-interest and were ready to make travesty of justice, from the leaders of the sanhedrin who condemned him on one charge and accused him to the governor on another, to the governor himself, who appeared determined to release him if he could do it without risk of personal popularity, and who ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... I neither know nor care," Said Baba; "but pray do as I desire: I have no more time nor many words to spare." "At least," said Juan, "sure I may inquire The cause of this odd travesty?"—"Forbear," Said Baba, "to be curious; 't will transpire, No doubt, in proper place, and time, and season: I have no authority ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... had never suffered before. George Ramsey was her first love; the others had been merely childish playthings. She was strangling love, and that is a desperate deed, and the strangler suffers more than love. Maria, with the memory of that marriage which was, indeed, no marriage, but the absurd travesty of one, upon her, was in almost a suicidal frame of mind. She knew perfectly well that if it had not been for that marriage secret which she held always in mind, that George Ramsey would continue to call, that they would become engaged, that her life might ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... manner of thieves, pick-pockets, burglars, sharpers, prostitutes, Peers of Parliament, their families and menials, all, or nearly all, the 'six hundred and odd scoundrels of the House of Commons,' the twenty thousand State parsons, who every Sunday shamelessly travesty the Christian religion in the interest of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the physicist; "give me its atoms alone, and I will explain the universe."' It is thought, even by Mr. Martineau's intimate friends, that in this pamphlet he is answering me. I must therefore ask the reader to contrast the foregoing travesty with what I really do say regarding atoms: 'I do not think that he [the materialist] is entitled to say that his molecular groupings and motions explain everything. In reality, they explain nothing. The utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes of phenomena, of whose ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Senator Morgan's bill to deprive the women of Utah of the right of suffrage because of the social institutions and religious faith originated and maintained by the men of the territory, is a travesty on common justice. While the wife has not absolute possession of even one husband, and the husband has many wives, surely the men and not the women, if either, should be ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... youth, they found an amusement in each other's knowing ways and conversation that kept them mutually faithful in a kind of mock-courtship. The gentleman, however, was evidently only amusing himself with this travesty of sentiment, though he was never led away by the charms of younger women. After a month of it he succeeded in persuading her for the first time to enter the water, and there he assisted her to take the billows in the gallant American ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... case which I have told elsewhere as "The Affair of the Tortoise." As for me, I had read Sir Spenser St. John's book on the black republic, and I had been greatly impressed by the graphic picture it gives of the horrible, blood-stained travesty of regular government there prevailing. Nothing in the worst of the South American Republics is to be remotely compared to it. In the worst periods there was not a crime imaginable that could not be, and was not, committed openly and with impunity by anybody ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... his gathering himself up for a leisurely canter across country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship among his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing of the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport, served as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It has the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in the saddle at least once in the year and compelling them to do some rough riding. The English have always made it their boast that they are more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... directly with the simplest human wants may have been responsible for an impression which I carried about with me almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated finally in a visit to Tolstoy—that the Settlement, or Hull-House at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse "to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share the common lot of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... the very verge of the grave. It is a curious satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan, commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one hundred ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the men who have studied the travesty on justice in the great labor trial at Montesano. "Not Guilty" is their verdict. Does it ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... Bodhisattvas of Tibet are a travesty of the Mahayana which on Indian soil adhered to the sound doctrine that saints are known by their achievements as men and cannot be selected among infant prodigies.[14] It was the general though not universal opinion that one who had entered on the career of a Bodhisattva could not fall so ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... pained by such a travesty of a noble name. "Scallywags" for SCALIGERS seems to me, if I may say so, a very cheap ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... feeble and tremulous utterance produced by his debility. The melody, which no weakness could destroy, gradually wrought its sweet influence on the senses of those who heard it. It even prevailed over the miserable travesty of the song of David which the singer had selected from a volume of similar effusions, and caused the sense to be forgotten in the insinuating harmony of the sounds. Alice unconsciously dried her tears, and bent her melting eyes on the pallid features of ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... great invalid chair. There, propped up in cushions, lay a fat travesty of the old Saradokis. This was a Sara whose tawny hair was turning gray with suffering; whose mouth, once so full and boyish, was now heavy and sinister, whose buoyancy had changed to the bitter irritability of the ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... average well-to-do woman, with some pretensions to good looks, sees a beautiful young creature with Junoesque air parading before her in bold color-combinations and doubtful harmonies, and she imagines she can venture the same thing with like effect. But alas! what a travesty the ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... it owed its origin to an Englishman, which surely, to a man whose object was reality, should have seemed an object worth recording. These letters, so full and apparently so frank, really so deceptive, are, as we have said, but one instance among many of the way in which popular writers on Japan travesty history by ignoring the part which foreigners have played. The reasons for this are not far to seek. A wonderful tale will please folks at a distance all the better if made more wonderful still. Japanese progress, traced to its causes ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... a dreadful one that Nancy could endure the situation no longer. From being anxious to let him down as easily as possible—for he was, after all, paying her a compliment—she wished the scene over at any cost. He was making the most holy of moments a travesty. She felt ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... mythological fable, Trove has scarcely ever reduced demi-god or hero to more fantastic plight than was this travesty of the great Henry. After dinner Madame de Traigny led her fair guest about the castle to show her the various points of view. At one window she paused, saying that it commanded a particularly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... hermaphroditism does not occur naturally in uncivilized or half-civilized races. The reason for this is patent. Atavism finds among them no weakened and enervated subjects on whom to perpetrate this strange travesty ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... before the date of the travesty known to us, and most popular amongst our mediaeval ancestors, it might be shown that some rude notion of Homer's fable and personages had ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... felt both extremes of fortune to the full. During the travesty of justice at his trial the attorney-general, having no sound argument, covered him with slanderous abuse. These are three of the false accusations on which he was condemned to death: 'Viperous traitor,' ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... come," Aggie explained. "I thought she ought to rest for a while longer anyhow." She half-shoved the girl into a chair opposite the desk, in an absurd travesty ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... despatch box in one corner. 'That's the Emerald Isle,' I thought, 'I'll soon have it out of the sea. The old man won't trust 'em to the old lady after what happened in town,' I needn't tell you I knew they were there somewhere; he made her wear them even at the tragic travesty ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... white sand lay the chalk-white skeleton of a man, the grinning mouth and sightless eyes staring up at me in a hideous travesty of mirth; and all around between the outstretched bones lay diamonds, diamonds innumerable: big, bright, sparkling beauties by the handful, wealth incredible to be had for the picking up, with no guardian other than these bare bones of a long ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... that you should be ruled by an undeveloped race, ignorant of law, letters, history, politics, political economy. There is no right anywhere in numbers or unintelligence to rule intelligence. It is a travesty of civilization. No Northern State that I know of would submit to be ruled by an undeveloped race. And human nature is exactly in the South what it is in the North. That is one impregnable fact, to be taken as the basis of all ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "Yes, the Law is here. Or what is more to the point, a representative of the Law is here. 'I am the Law,'" he quoted, ironically. "But my hands are tied; this court is a mere travesty upon justice. The government at Washington has seen fit to send me here—alone. I can't go out and get evidence; I couldn't secure a conviction if I did. The people here who are not Dunlavey's friends were afraid of him. I can't get a jury. Dunlavey elects the sheriff—controls ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... dragging them along with a scratching noise upon the floor. Liddy, elevating her feelings to the occasion from a sense of grandeur, floated off behind Bathsheba with a milder dignity not entirely free from travesty, and ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... with her, and a man stooped over Dylks and voided a mouthful of tobacco juice in his face; another lashed him on the head with a switch of leatherwood: all in a squalid travesty of the supreme tragedy of the race. As if a consciousness of the semblance touched the gospel-read actors in the drama, they shrank in turn from what they had done, and lost themselves ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... is a travesty on human progress, a social paradox, that war and science go hand in hand. On one side are all of the machines of destruction, the battleships, bombing-planes, huge guns, high explosives, and poisonous gases, products of scientific ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... his frontispiece—rather an advertisement—of Victor Hugo's Les Chatiments. It is as sinister, as malign as a Rops. The big book, title displayed, crushes to earth a vulture which is a travesty of the Napoleonic beak. Daumier was a power in Paris. Albert Wolff, the critic of Figaro, tells how he earned five francs each time he provided a text for a caricature by Daumier, and Philipon, who founded ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Philosophy of the Fine Arts," and aims at carrying a love of the beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant aspects. The great success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, "Patience," produced in 1881, was also to some extent due to the humorous allusions to the extravagances of the "Aesthetetes." In support of what may be termed a higher AEstheticism, ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... Ragamuffins," the little Fourth of July procession, which in the old days had seemed so funny, so exciting to me. I laughed no more. It filled me with bitterness to think that such a makeshift spectacle could amuse anyone. "How dull and eventless life must be to enable such a pitiful travesty to attract and hold the attention of girls like Ella and Flora," I thought as I saw them standing with their little sister to ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... pauper-societies, much better than she likes our frauds and wars. They are but so many yokes to the neck. Our painful labours are unnecessary and fruitless. A higher law than that of our will regulates events. If we look wider, things are all alike: laws and creeds and modes of living are a travesty of truth. Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become strong. Our real action is in our silent moments. Why should we be awed by the name of Action? 'Tis ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... usually Beltis) is the Syrian name for Aphrodite. Les Chansons de Bilitis are not without charm, but have been severely dealt with by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Sappho und Simonides, 1913, p. 63 et seq.) as "a travesty of Hellenism," betraying inadequate knowledge of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... farming and grazing lands. In that event Graustark will be no larger than one of the good-sized farms in your western country. There will be nothing left for Her Royal Highness to rule save a tract so small that the word principality will be a travesty and a jest. This city and twenty-five miles to the south, a strip about one hundred fifty miles long. Think of it! Twenty-five by one hundred fifty miles, and yet called a principality! Once the proudest and most ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... consisting of Lord Alverstone and the three American members, had decided substantially in favour of the United States. Sir Louis Jette and Mr Aylesworth declined to sign the award, and declared it in part a 'grotesque travesty ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... in the air and come. In the foreground, where a solitary Indian stood motionless, waiting, there was being repeated the same puerile pantomime and horse-play of a former occasion. At intervals, from the rear, sounded the war whoop travesty. It was all the same as that afternoon eighteen days before, when the girl had left, similar even to the cloud of black smoke in the distance lifting lazily into the sky; only now the trail, instead of growing thinner and lighter, became ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... found their way into that trackless region, firstly on Gershom himself, and secondly on his residence. These names were obtained from the intensity of their respective characters, in favor of the beverage named. L'eau de mort was the place termed by the voyagers, in a sort of pleasant travesty on the eau de vie of their distant, but still well-remembered manufactures on the banks of the Garonne. Ben Boden, however, paid but little attention to the drawling remarks of Gershom Waring. This was not the first time he had heard of "Whiskey Centre," though the first time he ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... part indeed amply pays its way, in showing how much of mirth may be caused by feebleness in a great attempt at a small matter. Besides, in him the mother element of the whole piece runs out into broad humour and travesty; his reasons for breaking with his master the Jew being, as it were, a variation in drollery upon the fundamental air of the play. Thus he exhibits under a comic form the general aspect of surrounding humanity; while at the same ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Frenchman could have borne to put even a fictitious eidolon of himself in such a contemptible light; very few Englishmen, though they might easily have done this, would have done it so neatly, and with so quaint a travesty of romantic situation. But the main story, as admitted above, is assommant, though, just before the breach, a substitution of three agreeable damsels for the nymph ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... ago! It threw a vivid flash of illumination on the many complexities she had come up against in his character. The two women who should mean most in a man's life had both failed him. He bore on his body a scar which surely he must never see reflected in the mirror without recalling the travesty of motherhood that was all he had ever known. And scored into his soul, hidden beneath a bitter reticence and unforgiving cynicism, lay the still deeper scar of that hurt which the woman who was to have been his wife had ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... statistics," went on Radbourn, pitilessly, "that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there's Sim Burns! what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend,—so does his wife,—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless future. No, they have a future, if they ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... excuse, on a platform receiving the respect of attention, marching with her fellows under common conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She had on her arm a sheaf of the War Cry. This was another indignity; she offered them right ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... Such was the genesis of "Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson", edited by John Fitz Victor. The name of the supposititious nephew reminds us of "Original Poems" by Victor and Cazire, and raises the question whether the poems in that lost volume may not have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... August day, one of the last of glorious Fructidor, had begun to wane, and the shades of evening to slowly creep into the long, bare room where this travesty of justice was ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... nothing, but put down a piece of money; and the man behind the counter said nothing, but took the money and filled the bottles, which were hidden under the tattered shawl again, and the speechless phantoms glided out, guarding that little travesty of modesty even ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... he burned with pain; Wetter was laying the blisters open to the air, that their sting might be sharper. At last, sorely beset, he divined a sympathy in me. He thought it disinterested, not perceiving that he had for me the fascination of a travesty of myself, and that in his marriage I enjoyed a burlesque presentiment of what mine would be. That point of view was my secret until Wetter's quick wit penetrated it; he worked days before he found out why I was drawn to the impresario; his ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... meditations not to be exhibited by much weeping." But, I do not therefore admit that a Western gentleman named Wordsworth (who made a somewhat similar remark) had plagiarised from Wo Wo, or was a mere Occidental fable and travesty of that celebrated figure. I do not deny that Tinishona wrote that exquisite example of the short Japanese poem entitled "Honourable Chrysanthemum in Honourable Hole in Wall." But I do not therefore admit that Tennyson's little verse about the flower in the cranny was not original ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... affair was a transparent travesty upon justice, and the method by which it was conducted threw into a strong light the faulty character of the French method of trial. The result, indeed, was so flagrantly unsatisfactory that no further punishment was inflicted upon the accused, and in July, 1906, his case was brought before ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... governors—the power of issuing special enactments and thereby setting aside the normal laws as well as of placing under arrest and deporting to Siberia, without the due process of law, all citizens suspected of "political unsafety." This travesty of a habeas corpus Act, insuring the inviolability of police and gendarmerie, and practically involving the suspension of the current legislation in a large part of the monarchy, has ever since been annually renewed ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... leading Sunday newspaper in the spring of 1919, signalized by this amazing travesty of the actual facts. In a reference to our land forces of the early days of the struggle, the writer spoke of "armies sent to war lacking almost every modern requisite." Now, the Press generally manages to avoid grossly ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... purpose to consider here all Bruno's articles of faith or unfaith, but rather to show the general tendency of his teaching, in order to trace its effect upon his contemporaries in England. His philosophy, itself a travesty of various systems, was in its turn caricatured and vulgarised in a manner which would, perhaps, had he lived to see it, have gone far to persuade him of the risk to popular order and morality which he incurred, in taking from people their belief in ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... room told him that his brothers were awake and watching him, though the monk still snored on in his stertorous fashion. One after the other the pair stole from their beds and looked for a moment at this skilful travesty of nature's handiwork, and both nodded in token ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... industrials now do their little drama of the war-dance and the oration and the council-smoke. That drama has degenerated into a very feeble farce now, and the actors in it would be quite outdone in their travesty by any average corps of "supes" at one of our theatres. By-and-by all this will have died out, and the "Indian side" of the stream at Lorette will be assimilated in all its features to the other. The moccason is already typifying the decadence of aboriginal things there. That article ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... ability—though evidently also as narrow-minded and unfair as only a bigot can be. All through the examination that ensued he took a leading part, and with him, to be accused was to be set down at once as guilty. Never, among either Christian or heathen people, was there a greater travesty of justice than these examinations and trials for witchcraft, conducted by the very foremost men of the ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... or sympathy need be wasted on President Kruger or the Transvaal Republic. The latter (Republic) is a shadow of a name, and as great a travesty and burlesque on the word as it is possible ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... of Latin and Greek, is to very little purpose indeed. Translation! what a strange word! To me I confess it appears the most unaccountable invention, that ever entered into the mind of man. To distil the glowing conceptions, and to travesty the beautiful language of the ancients, through the medium of a language estranged to all its peculiarities and all its elegancies. The best thoughts and expressions of an author, those that distinguish one writer from another, are precisely those that are least capable of being ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... conducted by Dr. Barlow, Bishop of Rochester. They had been brought to London to be schooled into conformity; and as part of the process, the English bishops had been commanded to prepare a series of sermons for their benefit. These were such a travesty on the texts of Scripture they were supposed to expound, that if they had been addressed to the ministers' own congregations in Scotland, the humblest of their hearers would have resented them. Whatever these bishops could do, they certainly could not preach. They belonged to that ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... blood, the yeoman blood of sturdy middle class freemen—the blood of the race which has conquered on every field since the Roman Empire went down under its sinewy blows. They prated little of honor, and knew nothing of "chivalry" except in its repulsive travesty in the South. As citizens at home, no honest labor had been regarded by them as too humble to be followed with manly pride in its success; as soldiers in the field, they did their duty with a calm defiance of danger and death, that the world has not seen equaled in the six thousand years ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... sincerity of Mr. Bryan's attachment to the cause of arbitration; but it is strange that he does not see what a disservice he does to arbitration by accepting and preaching a travesty of it. When there is litigation between individuals over an alleged wrong, the first condition is that the wrong shall stop for the interim—a result effected through an interim injunction between nations. There is no judge to grant ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II. I went thither once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great vivacity of feeling. As we were gazing on Michael ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fine old horror of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home business. Here is something for them to do—the regeneration of society ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... credit and as an instance of her intimate familiarity with American affairs, one hundred years prior to that Revolution which emancipated the people of this land from the same tyranny under which she herself has groaned. And yet, what a cruel travesty on history it reads like now, when we scan the official records of the New England colonies and find that the Irish were often called "convicts", and it was thought that measures should be taken to prevent their landing on the soil where they and their sons afterwards shed their ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... ago, Japan adopted the outward forms of Western civilisation, her action was regarded by many as a stage trick—a sort of travesty employed for a temporary purpose. But what do they think now, when they see cabinets and chambers of commerce compelled to reckon with the British of the North Pacific? The awakening of Japan's huge neighbour ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... little smoked on the exterior, raw and sinewy within, and an affront to the whole profession of innkeeping. Whereupon, in the days that followed, looking back at our fine mood of expectancy as we entered that hostelry, and its pitiable collapse when the miserable travesty of victuals was laid before us, we fell to thinking about some of the inns we had known of old time where we had ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... business on reassembling; Truculent TIM, coming to the front at least urgent opportunity, demanded that Irish business should not be taken as first Order. OLD MORALITY promptly gave desired pledge. Then MARJORIBANKS, who, to travesty TREVELYAN's famous saying, Though a Whip, is a Scottish gentleman, broke the long pause of eloquent silence cultivated in the Lobby; protested against Scotch Members being placed in inconvenient position, by being obliged to put in appearance on first day after holidays. Welsh ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... a beginning, it was a vast amount still. So conceived, and at the eleventh hour saddled with an amendment directing the building of a costly feeder which the engineers had declared needless, the travesty of all the governor's good intentions passed both Houses by a narrow ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... in the closet for dresses, cloaks, and artificial flowers; Brigitte, as usual, was patient and cheerful. We both arranged a sort of travesty; she wished to dress my hair herself; we painted and powdered ourselves freely; all that we lacked was found in an old chest that had belonged, I believe, to the aunt. In an hour we could not recognize each other. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... her son to his room. He is master of the house and yet he has never been possessor. Almost ten years ago it was being finished and furnished for the splendid woman in the opposite room, and by a strange travesty of fate he has brought her here to-day. But he has no time for retrospection. He hardly hears what his mother is saying as he stands his little girl on a chair by the window ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... telling each other the news, or secrets, stop to set their words to music, and roar and howl in each other's ears, the world will be mad, and the opera natural," he said. "I will not lend my countenance before them to such a villainous travesty." ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... armies as a spy. The latter had been arrested because his little girl had picked up a bit of telephone wire broken by shrapnel. One morning toward 6 o'clock the Bavarian officers went through a travesty of justice, reading documents drawn up in German, collecting the votes of eight or nine young Lieutenants to whom voting papers had been given. The two men were condemned unanimously and warned that they were about to die, and the priest was requested ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... ribbons, but she had not had strength to paint her lips and cheeks again, and the old woman's efforts had ended pitifully. She had grown very small in the last few hours, and with her thin, daubed face and blood-stained lips, she looked like a sorrowful travesty of the little circus clown who had ridden the fat pony and shouted "Oh la—la!" and blown kisses to ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... looked forward to a grand speech to the jury that would make 'em all blubber and acquit Pete without leaving the box, on the grounds of emotional or erratic insanity—or whatever it is that murderers get let off on when their folks are well fixed. He sputters quite a lot about this monstrous travesty on justice before they can drill the real facts into his head; and even then he keeps coming back ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... out and the open spaces increased as he approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk like a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human. It was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled like a sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were, with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents the honest drawing of his well-known features, why, so much the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... with Ale or viler Liquors, Didst inspire WITHERS, PRYN, and VICARS. This Vicars was a man of as great interest and authority in the late Reformation as Pryn or Withers, and as able a poet. He translated Virgil's AEneids into as horrible Travesty, in earnest, as the French Scaroon did in burlesque, and was only outdone in his way by the ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... she would willingly and cheerfully allow herself to be tricked out in colored kerchiefs, ribands, and flowers, and on her part could contrive the most fantastic costumes for them. So soon as she saw Hermas with the helmet on, the fancy seized her to carry through the travesty he had begun. She eagerly and in perfect innocence pulled the coat of armor straight, helped him to buckle the breastplate and to fasten on the sword, and as she performed the task, at which Hermas proved himself ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... replied, with some temper. "I must have disgusted you last night. What sort of a miserable, spineless, cowardly, caddish travesty of a man do you take me for, to think I would ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... "Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control—if you could see their faces, ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,—a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... like being with eternal youth, and made her long for her own lost youth with an ache of desperation. But to act being young is hideously different from being actually young. She acted astonishingly well, but she paid for every moment of the travesty, and Rupert never noticed, never had the least suspicion of all she was going ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... fear-distorted face of Mark Fenwick peeped out into the corridor. He came shambling along on tottering limbs, and his coarse mouth twitched horribly. It seemed to Vera as if she were looking at a mere travesty of the man who so short a time ago had been so ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... could have seen our army nowhere more discreditably represented than in this Castle of Edinburgh. And I used to see myself in fancy, and blush. It seemed that my more elegant carriage would but point the insult of the travesty. And I remembered the days when I wore the coarse but honourable coat of a soldier; and remembered further back how many of the noble, the fair, and the gracious had taken a delight to tend my childhood.... ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Horace Williams said, if a dead horse could be made to go this one would have brought Murchison romping in. And Lorne had taken heed to the counsel of his party leaders. At joint meetings, which offered the enemy his best opportunity for travesty and derision, he had left it in the background of debate, devoting himself to arguments of more immediate utility. In the literature of the campaign it glowed with prospective benefit, but vaguely, like a halo of Liberal conception and possible ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... grief. The comedy is in a lighter and happier vein; its situations may be trying but they end happily; the sun shines and the air is clear; if storms appear they are the showers of a summer day, not awful tempests. The comedy descends through various forms to the travesty and farce whose purpose is solely to excite laughter by ludicrous scenes and absurd incidents. The melodrama abounds in thrilling situations and extravagant efforts to excite emotions, but its final outcome ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... alludes to his friendship with a much younger and gayer man than himself, Charles Cotton (born 1630), the friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir John Suckling: the translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of Montaigne's Essays. Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in debt, but he was a Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship between him and Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man and to the kindness of ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... Caxton, when I was a child I was so bored with 'Telemachus' that, in order to endure it, I turned it into travesty." ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his literature, he must express himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... religion.'[34] The fact that the largest section of Christendom has become what Rome now is, is no proof that theirs is the line of true development. We can see this clearly enough if we consider the case of Buddhism. The main existing developments of Buddhism are a mere travesty of the spirit of Sakya Muni.[35] In this way Dr. Gore anticipates and rejects the argument since then put forward by Loisy, and other Liberal Catholic apologists, that history has proved Roman Catholicism to be the proper development of Christ's religion. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... The chances are ten to one that the conversation is mainly manufactured in the brain of the narrator, and that the quotation is either not written by the author to whom it is attributed, or else is a travesty of his real language. It is Lord Byron who tells of that numerous class of sciolists whom one ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... through his boots. He gave one the impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb—the inborn and incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of it and scheming out a portrait in which that essential quality could be expressed; ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... poetry, the fable and the parody, which, though differing widely from each other, have both their source in the turn for the delineation of the ludicrous, and both stand in close historical relation to the iambic. The fable in Greece originated in an intentional travesty of human affairs. It is probable that the taste for fables of beasts and numerous similar inventions found its way from the East, since this sort of symbolical narrative is more in accordance with the Oriental ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... contrast with the colour of her chintz dress, thus producing what the French term "une gamme de couleur," most pleasing to the eye, and with never a false note in it. Beside these comely, amply breasted bronze statues, the British West Indian negress, with her absurd travesty of European fashions, and her grotesque hats, cuts, I am bound to say, a ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men. The latter's first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Romanist, says: "The hymns which he translated from the Latin into German may be unreservedly praised, as also those which he composed for the members of his own communion. He did not travesty the sacred Word nor set his anger to music. He is grave, simple, solemn, and grand. He was at once the poet and musician of a great number of ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... opportunity to recommend his works by every species of advertisement; no man could lie in a literary sense with more self-complacency, and a clearer conception of the business value of the falsehood; but it is wonderful to find people choosing to travesty the palpably obvious, sooner than accept the plain truth as it lies naked on the face of the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Let me look at you. If so, you do it cleverly. Your face is honest. Yet I hear it was for me alone this travesty ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. It was a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... reached the street. He found it hard, too, to get her out of his eyes, even now—she had impressed herself so shockingly upon him. The picture of her floated in front of him, above the shimmering pavement, as if he still confronted her in all her unloveliness, the smooth, white face like a travesty on youth, the swift, darting eyes, the hard, straight lines of the lean figure, the cold deliberation of ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... to our fellows; it forms no part of the Creator's methods with us or this particular mote in the beam of the Universe. Man has never received Justice, as he understands it, and never will; and his own poor, flagrant, fallible travesty of it, erected to save him from himself, and called Law, more nearly approximates to Justice than the treatment which has ever been apportioned to humanity. Before this eternal spectacle of illogical austerity, therefore, man, in self-defence and to comfort his ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... with shame as he thought to himself that a foreigner might apparently journey through the country from one end to the other without knowing that there was such a thing as a soldier in the land. What a travesty this was on civilization! How baseless the proud boasts of national greatness when only an insignificant and almost invisible few paid any attention to the claims of military glory! The outlook was indeed dismal, but Sam was no pessimist. ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... knew this gentleman very well at Newport, exchanging with him occasional visits, though he was much my senior in years. His name was Fauvel, which the midshipmen, or other, had promptly Anglicized into Four Bells—a nautical hour-stroke. I suppose this propensity to travesty foreign or difficult names is not merely maritime; but naturally enough my reading has brought me more in contact with it in connection with naval matters. Thus the Ville de Milan, captured into the British service, became to their seamen the "Wheel 'em along;" and the Bellerophon, originally ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... that were revealed, while the motives for acts were now laid bare that till then he had misunderstood! He had often heard the old saying, that if every person in a ball-room could read the thoughts of the rest, the ball would seem a travesty on enjoyment, rather than real pleasure, and now he perceived its force. He also noticed that many were better than he had supposed, and were trying, in a blundering but persevering way, to obey their consciences. He saw some unselfish thoughts and ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... forty per cent. of the population cannot read, where, to-day, three-fourths of the illiteracy of the whole nation exists; where the darkness is increasing more rapidly than it is being lighted up; where much which passes for religion even among those who preach it, is a travesty upon Christianity, openly divorced from relationship with truth, purity, ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various
... man, who was intended by the people who voted for him to have no other connection with reconstruction than what a casting vote in the Senate might possibly give him, has taken the whole vast subject into his exclusive control. Was there ever acted on the stage of history such a travesty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... she used her power, and it was alleged that she was overmuch in the company of divers magicians and astrologers who had been brought from Italy, and that the black art alone was responsible for her success. These accusations finally aroused such public hostility that, after a trial which was a travesty upon justice, Eleanora was soon condemned to death, on the charge of having unduly influenced the queen by means of magic philters. Eleanora went to her death bravely, saying with dignity to her accusers: "The philter which ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... text and {vgrep} the output in hopes of finding an interesting new word. (In the preceding example, 'window sysIWYG' and 'informash' show some promise.) Iterated applications of Dissociated Press usually yield better results. Similar techniques called 'travesty generators' have been employed with considerable satirical effect to the utterances of ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... tempted to explain them away when he came across them, or to ascribe their origin and effects to other instincts which were more intelligible to him. The wonderland which the mystic inhabits was closed to him, he remained outside of it and reproduced in sarcastic travesty the reports he heard of its marvels. What he has called the secondary causes of the growth of Christianity, were much rather its effects. The first is "the inflexible and intolerant zeal of the Christians" and their abhorrence ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... that (and "the half is not told") sounds to the unobservant like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the principles of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no element of exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great strike or lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious and undisputed, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... the Belgians protested that to interpret the intentions of the French Government in this manner was to travesty them, and to allow oneself to be misled as to the feelings of the French nation by the manifestations of a few hotheads, or ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... or bellows of derisive mirth. Why? Because these pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it, and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character, but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of affiliation of instinct that which is fine in the ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... to the bateau did Carrigan dare to glance back over his shoulder at the man who was paddling, to see what effect the fistic travesty had left on him. He was a big-mouthed, clear-eyed, powerfully-muscled fellow, and he was ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... traditions and conventions which their grand-parents regarded with almost sacred reverence. The young men are worse, if anything, and as for the married people of the new era, what they are doing to the sanctity of the home and the bonds of matrimony might seem like a weird travesty of the teachings ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Having by a travesty of truth created a false theological bogey, bearing little resemblance either to Catholic or to Anglican teaching, Lord Dawson proceeds to demolish his own creation by a somewhat boisterous eulogy of sex-love. Now sex-love is an ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... her sitting with the letter in her lap, as if she had not moved from her posture while she had been away exchanging her Ptolemaic travesty for the ease of a long silken morning gown of Nile green. She came back buttoning it at her throat, when she gave a start of high tragic satisfaction at something stonily rigid in Cornelia's attitude, but she kept to herself both her satisfaction and the poignant sympathy she felt ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... is a more recent travesty of the well-known scene in Dante's Inferno where Bertrand de Born, a noted sower of sedition, comes forth with his severed head in his hands. In the Russian version the renowned editor of the Moscow Gazette is seen hobbling along with a cannon-ball labelled "Police Surveillance" at his ankle, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... the orthodox economists this criticism has an element of truth in it; but when the socialists attempt to act on their own loudly boasted principles, and deal with human nature as a whole instead of only one of its elements, they do nothing but travesty the error which they set out with denouncing. The one-motived economic man who cares only for personal gain is, no doubt, an abstraction, like the lines and points of Euclid. Still the motive ascribed to him is one which has a real existence ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... received, through a long line of apostolical succession, some mystic power for administering rites and conferring absolution, together with those who came beneath the touch of their priestly hands. That theory has notoriously broken down. But the truth of which it is a grotesque travesty is presented in our Lord's conception of the vine, deeply planted in the dark grave of Joseph's garden, which had reached down its branches through the ages, and in which every believing soul has a part. Touch Christ, become one with Him in living union, abide in Him, and you are one with the glorious ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... oddly enough, an almost total lack of resentment amongst the victims consigned here by an infamous travesty of justice. Madame Akimova, for instance, a plain but homely-looking person, seemed devoted to the care of her miserable little household to the exclusion of all mundane matters. I sometimes wondered, as I sat in her hut, and watched the pale, patient little woman clad in rusty black ceaselessly ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... more human nature? not studied with the microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight, with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right. And, once more, to make an end of commendations, what novel ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... however, at Fidenae, it was better. We had a travesty of the taking of Troy, which was eminently ludicrous, and which deserves a better description than I can give. Troy was a space inclosed within paper barriers, about breast-high, painted "to present a wall," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... esthetic sense, was ghastly. These pious young men and women, who, on no account, were allowed to dance, were going through something far more indecent than any dancing I had ever seen, and to music which was a travesty of one of the most sacred of Christian compositions. I have long regarded camp-meetings as among the worst influences to which our rural youth are subjected—Joe Miller jokes in the pulpit, hysterics in the pews, with an atmosphere often blasphemous and sometimes erotic. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... did they work out a travesty on one of the most august utterances ever penned. A young man who was present remarked: "Tour grievances must be grievous indeed when you are obliged to go to books in order to find them out." He might have added, "And they must be false indeed when ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... happy if you will join us." At this I glanced at our dresses in some confusion, which being observed by the gentleman, he hastened to say: "You need be under no anxiety about your appearance, for this is a costume night, and the greater number of our guests are in travesty." As he spoke he threw open the door of a large drawing-room and invited us in. On entering we found a company of men and women, well-dressed, some in ordinary evening attire and some costumed. The room was brilliantly lighted and beautifully furnished and decorated. At one end ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... presently she would be wearing the black hood, pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe of a Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen guarded as holy relics in a chamber of the Louvre; last travesty of all (and it was in this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman, clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man's hat set rakishly on her dainty head. He would fain spend his life in these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... magistrates, and society generally; and he is almost invariably fond of dangling a sword or other weapon, and wearing some kind of uniform, for the assumption of militarism without severe toil delights him. But it is in a degenerate travesty of the ancient labour of hunting where, at terrible risk to himself, and with endless fatigue, his ancestors supplied the race with its meat and defended it from destruction by wild beasts) that he finds his greatest satisfaction; it serves to render the degradation and ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... peace; having heard my "Tannhauser" overture, they wanted absolutely to have a taste of one of my operas. I allowed myself at last to be talked over, and am now about to introduce to the imagination of my friends a travesty of my opera, as closely resembling it as possible. Everything as regards scenery and orchestra is done to help that resemblance; the singers are not a bit better or worse than everywhere else; so I shall find ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... turn them out when I begin to feel the beast in them, and presently they wander there. They all dread this house and me. There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it, for he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one or two of them to our service. He's ashamed of it, but I believe he half likes some of those beasts. It's his business, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in repetition. It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe's mission in ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... ethical, were the only permanent testament that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body, only, of his message; its spirit lived—lived in ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... music, aside from the impossibility of making its delicate rhythms fit into those of a dance, has a variety and sublimity of meaning so far transcending the personality of any human being, that to attempt to focus it in a dancer, no matter how charming, would be a travesty. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... British select their island home; destiny and history were again the determining factors. But it would be a travesty of the truth to assert that Germany has not envied her that position, together with the advantages arising from it. Yet in the same degree as the inhabitants of these islands have used the "talents" entrusted to them through their favourable position, Germany's jealousy ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... of him, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, for she eats what comes from his table, and, being fed of one flesh, are they not brother and sister to one another in virtue of community of nutriment, which is but a thinly veiled travesty of descent? When she eats peas with her knife, he does so too; there is not a bit of bread and butter she puts into her mouth, nor a lump of sugar she drops into her tea, but he knoweth it altogether, though he knows nothing whatever about it. She is en-Croesused and he en-scullery-maided ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... In that event Graustark will be no larger than one of the good-sized farms in your western country. There will be nothing left for Her Royal Highness to rule save a tract so small that the word principality will be a travesty and a jest. This city and twenty-five miles to the south, a strip about one hundred fifty miles long. Think of it! Twenty-five by one hundred fifty miles, and yet called a principality! Once the proudest and most prosperous ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... followed was a repetition of the "stunts" for which the various members of the little circle were famous and which were always performed for Mrs. Gray's pleasure. "Oakdale's Great Mystery," of which Hippy calmly admitted the authorship, proved to be a ridiculous travesty on a melodrama which the boys had seen the previous winter. Hippy as the much-vaunted Mystery, with a handkerchief mask, a sweeping red portiere cloak, and an ultra-mysterious shuffle was received with shrieks of laughter by the audience. The dramatic manner in which, after a series of humorous ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... drawn rein and sat on his horse in the road. He was trying to picture Hannah standing in the door waiting for him, to hear her calling him from work; but always Phebe intervened with her travesty of Hannah's ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... day will generally admit that the "gouty hexameters" of the original poem, which celebrates the apotheosis of King George in heaven, are much more blasphemous than the ottava rima of the travesty, which professes to narrate the difficulties of his getting there. Byron's Vision of Judgment is as unmistakably the first of parodies as the Iliad is the first of epics, or the Pilgrim's Progress the first of allegories. In ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... an eagerly expectant audience, brown and white, who applauded loudly when the Pahi Minstrels emerged from a little boarded room in one corner, and took up their positions on the platform at the end of the hall. Then, for two mortal hours, there was a dismal and lugubrious travesty of the performances of that world-famous troupe which never ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... governors-general and the governors—the power of issuing special enactments and thereby setting aside the normal laws as well as of placing under arrest and deporting to Siberia, without the due process of law, all citizens suspected of "political unsafety." This travesty of a habeas corpus Act, insuring the inviolability of police and gendarmerie, and practically involving the suspension of the current legislation in a large part of the monarchy, has ever since been annually renewed by special imperial enactments, and has remained in force until ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... have given no more conclusive proof of his courage and his earnestness of purpose than in selecting as the motif of this book that outrage upon justice, that travesty on morality; the condemnation of woman for a crime that is readily ignored or as readily forgiven in man. It is really such an outworn theme that the very mention of it is greeted with smiles or supercilious shrugs, and even lovers of their kind have grown ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... dreaming with wide staring eyes of the long blood-stained history of human Slavery and its sharp contrast with the strange travesty of such an institution which the South ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... the way, in my impatience forgetful of his great paunch and little legs, so that he was sorely tried to keep pace with me. Yet who would not have been in haste, urged by such a spur as had I? Here, then, was the end of my shameful travesty. To-morrow a soldier's harness should replace the motley of a jester; the name by which I should be known again to men would be that of Lazzaro Biancomonte, and no longer Boccadoro—the Fool of the ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... the three; and were as still as if nothing were the matter. They were looking at the Lord Chief Justice, at whom I too turned my eyes, and saw he was grinning and talking behind his hand to the Recorder. It was a very travesty of justice that I was looking at, and no true trial at all. There were a thousand points of dissonance that I had remarked myself—as to how it was, for instance, that one fellow had been promised twenty ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... was a certain bundle of ideas—some of them very illiterate, some very delicate hair-splitting, some curious even to comicality,—gathered out of the writings of a certain number of men, who assuredly were not inspired, since they often travesty Scripture, and at times diametrically contradict it. Having lived in the darkest times of the Church, they were extremely ignorant and superstitious, even the best of them being enslaved by fancies as ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... be emphasised by bringing it nearer to its source. From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go back to the original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life. Already, the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests to us an image of this kind. For, as soon as we forget ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... reason for staying his; the one who owned this daffodil was as cunning as he. He had done what he had, badly of course he could not do otherwise—a foredained failure such as he—bungled it hopelessly; but the idea was the same—a bad travesty of a bad idea, badly worked out. For a moment her mind glanced aside from the main issue in disgust and contempt for the method. It was sin without genius, a puerile theft without adequate return, a miserable ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... barrack-room smartness of address: indeed, you could have seen our army nowhere more discreditably represented than in this Castle of Edinburgh. And I used to see myself in fancy, and blush. It seemed that my more elegant carriage would but point the insult of the travesty. And I remembered the days when I wore the coarse but honourable coat of a soldier; and remembered further back how many of the noble, the fair, and the gracious had taken a delight to tend my childhood.... But I must not recall ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this twaddle, farce, travesty and by- play regarding Tommy! You know I warned you, over and over, and you mustn't blame me for the deception. I never thought you'd take it so in earnest!" and here the jovial Major again ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... my good friend Dr. Duchat. If that excellent man had not long since died he should have shared in my triumph. I took Stepan to my home and plied the saw and the knife. could operate on that poor, worthless, useless, hopeless travesty of humanity as fearlessly and as recklessly as upon a dog bought or caught for vivisection. That was a little more than twenty years ago. To-day Stepan Borovitch wields more power than any other man on the face of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... hours was this travesty of battle maintained. Then the Indian fire slackened, and finally ceased altogether. Believing the affair to be merely a temporary outbreak of a few hot-headed savages, that must quickly blow over, Gladwyn took advantage ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent—the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... principle of adapting it to a modern and English treatment of its topics. Caesar, upon this system, becomes George the Second—a very strange sort of Caesar; and Pope is supposed to have been laughing at him, which may be the color that Pope gave to the travesty amongst his private circle; otherwise there is nothing in the expressions to sustain such a construction. Rome, with a little more propriety, masquerades as England, and France as Greece, or, more strictly, as Athens. Now, by such a transformation, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... malefactor and nothing else. He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a "product of social conditions," save as a highwayman is "produced" by the fact than an unarmed man happens to have a purse. It is a travesty upon the great and holy names of liberty and freedom to permit them to be invoked in such a cause. No man or body of men preaching anarchistic doctrines should be allowed at large any more than if preaching the murder of some specified private individual. Anarchistic speeches, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of the Belgians protested that it was a travesty of the intentions of the French Government to interpret them in that sense, and to let oneself be misled as to the sentiments of the French nation by the ebullitions of a few irresponsible spirits or ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... letters and papers entrusted to his charge. In very stormy weather the mail guard would prop up the lid of his imperial and get inside for shelter. On one occasion when the mail arrived at Liverpool the guard was found imprisoned in his letter-box. The lid had fallen and fastened in the male travesty of "Ginevra." Fortunately for him it was a burlesque and not a tragedy. Bags thrown to the guards at wayside stations not unfrequently got under the wheels of the train and the contents were cut to pieces. On one occasion, on the Grand ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... struck by editorials, many of them couched in language even stronger and more suited to fan the public rage. The recent trial was called an outrageous travesty on justice; attention was directed to the damnable vagaries of recent juries which had been impaneled to try ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... It will never come! No, the marriage was a travesty from the beginning, and I ought to have pulled her out of it. I did suggest it to her, but she said she was going to stick it out ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... romantic out-of-the-way nature to the commonplace incidents and persons of domestic life; out of the stuff of which they made their emperors, their heroes, and their princesses, they cut out a pompous country justice, a hectoring tailor, or an impudent mantua-maker; but it was not merely this travesty of great personages, nor the lofty effusions of one in a lowly station, which terminated the object of parody. It was designed for a higher object, that of more obviously exposing the original for any absurdity ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... they not lived and died in respectable allegiance to the Homeric personality? To say nothing of a mystical admiration of the Greek hexameters which he could not construe, Colonel Prowley was a diligent reader of Pope's sonorous travesty. He felt like some simple believer in the divine right of kings, when the mob have broken into the palace, and stand in no awe of the stucco and red velvet. Yes, of course I admire original minds,—but then I love ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... His Church. If its votaries cannot destroy her, nor put an end to her charmed life, they hope, at least, to defame her character and to blacken her reputation. They seize every opportunity to misrepresent her doctrine, to travesty her history, and to denounce her as retrograde, old fashioned, and out of date. And, what makes matters worse, the falsest and most mischievous allegations are often accompanied by professions of friendship and consideration, and set forth in learned treatises, with an elegance of language ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... preserved, was translated into Latin by Julius Valerius about the end of the 3rd century, and an epitome of this translation, also in Latin, was made some time before the 9th century, and is introduced by Vincent de Beauvais into his Speculum historiale. Much of the legend is a running travesty of the true history of the conqueror. The first book deals with his birth and early exploits. The trace of Alexandrian influence is to be found in the pretence that his actual father was Nectanebus, a fugitive king of Egypt. The latter ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... clothes, to learn the trick of her voice, of her slow, soft gait, of her little, surprised laugh. But I soon give it up. If I tried till my death-day, I should never arrive at any thing but a miserable travesty. Before—ere Roger's return—I used complacently to treasure up any little civil speeches, any small compliments that people paid me, thinking, "If such and such a one think me pleasing, why may not Roger?" But now I have ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... from their decisions; they were simply required to report afterward! Only members of the Bolshevik party were immune from this terror. Alminsky, a Bolshevist writer of note, felt called upon to protest against this hideous travesty of democratic justice, ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... and daughter, in their travesty of mistress and maid—enough of itself to excite suspicion of foul play—and climbed up the rickety steps of the hackney-coach, rejoicing over their victim. It mattered not; the captain would make the fourth ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... loose with the rites of the Church. Indulgences for a hundred years were readily granted for a consideration. The manufacture of relics became an organized branch of industry; and festivals of fools and festivals of asses were invented by the jovial priests themselves in travesty of sacred mysteries, as a welcome relaxation from the monotony of prescribed ecclesiastical ceremony. Pilgrimages increased in number and frequency; new saints were created by the dozen; and the disbelief of the clergy in the doctrines they professed was manifest even to the most illiterate, ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... act which only seemed to prove that the hateful voice had prophesied truly. Taking up a stone, I hurled it down on the water to shatter the image I saw there, as if it had been no faithful reflection of myself, but a travesty, cunningly made of enamelled clay or some other material, and put there by some ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... sinister in every move, as if his body was driven on without conscious volition, actuated by some dreadful, unclean force. Breed knew it for some sort of poisoning, and his muscles bunched for flight. Shady barked angrily as if to drive the thing away. Then Breed saw a hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a draw and halt directly in the path of the mad coyote. Cripp stood there grinning till he felt the other's teeth score his unprotected hide; then he whirled and snapped back at him. The ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... the door to—to this hideous travesty of a room opening. Her eyes darted around the shrunken metal-walled shell, even the ceiling curved overhead, and she saw two grotesque daubs taped to the walls that parodied the paintings of her dead brother Alex. The coloring was ugly ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells
... charms and incantations. Two of the Fujiwara nobles were appointed to investigate the accusation, and they condemned the prince to die by his own hand. He committed suicide, and his wife and children died with him. The travesty of justice was carefully acted throughout. A proclamation was issued promising capital punishment to any one, of whatever rank or position, who compassed the death or injury of another by spells or incantations, and, six months later, the lady ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... which have been put to me since my return to America have called to my attention the fact that, in spite of all that has been written about Russia, the common incidents of everyday life are not known, or are known so imperfectly that any statement of them is a travesty. I may cite, as an example, a book published within the past two years, and much praised in America by the indiscriminating as a truthful picture of life. The whole story hung upon the great musical talent ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... illumination on the many complexities she had come up against in his character. The two women who should mean most in a man's life had both failed him. He bore on his body a scar which surely he must never see reflected in the mirror without recalling the travesty of motherhood that was all he had ever known. And scored into his soul, hidden beneath a bitter reticence and unforgiving cynicism, lay the still deeper scar of that hurt which the woman who was to have been his ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... then it is a comedy, but if it has no story or cannot be told humorously, then no amount of bolstering will ever make it into a comedy. You may add a lot of knockabout and perhaps get an acceptable farce, or you can write in sensation and get travesty, but you cannot by these means change the unfit into comedy, and the broad use of 'comedy' to apply to anything intended to be diverting is a misuse of an ancient and honorable word.... To my way of thinking comedy is first of all a good story. It is a story ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... pass, stands forth as the one calm and undisturbed actor among all those who took part in the tragic doings of that day. His judges and foes were all swayed by passion and self-interest and were ready to make travesty of justice, from the leaders of the sanhedrin who condemned him on one charge and accused him to the governor on another, to the governor himself, who appeared determined to release him if he could do it without risk of personal popularity, and who yet, in order to avoid accusation ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... Montmorencys, is also indicated, adding singularity. The half-recumbent figure by the Duke's side, is of rare pathos and beauty. Almost angelic in its resignation and religious fervour is the upturned face. The drapery, too, shows classic grace and simplicity, as strongly contrasted with the martial travesty opposite as are the two countenances ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... complacency in dealing it out. His part indeed amply pays its way, in showing how much of mirth may be caused by feebleness in a great attempt at a small matter. Besides, in him the mother element of the whole piece runs out into broad humour and travesty; his reasons for breaking with his master the Jew being, as it were, a variation in drollery upon the fundamental air of the play. Thus he exhibits under a comic form the general aspect of surrounding humanity; while at ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... not do what they ought to do, nor what they would do, nor, it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. 'Then, resuming his usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew,' does perhaps reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to be found in any other branch ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... it leaves out the difference in character between the child and the cretin. The latter has none of the curiosity, the seeking for experience, the active interest, the pliant expanding will, the sweet capacity for affection, friendship and love present in the average child. The cretin is a travesty on the human being in ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Oh, the secrets that were revealed, while the motives for acts were now laid bare that till then he had misunderstood! He had often heard the old saying, that if every person in a ball-room could read the thoughts of the rest, the ball would seem a travesty on enjoyment, rather than real pleasure, and now he perceived its force. He also noticed that many were better than he had supposed, and were trying, in a blundering but persevering way, to obey their consciences. He ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Princesses, whose minutest word and glance yet lives for us in the searchlight of Fanny Burney's adoring scrutiny. Afar, the sons pursued their wild careers. The Prince of Wales, the mirror of fashion, diced and drank, coquetted with politics and kingship, and—a very travesty of chivalry—betrayed his friend, broke the heart of the woman who loved him, deserted the woman who had wedded him, and tortured with petty jealousy the sensitive soul of the child who ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... a sigh over the loss of The Scented Garden, and we should not have minded one straw if Lady Burton had burnt also her typewritten travesty of the Catullus; but her destruction of Sir Richard's private journals and diaries was a deed that one finds it very hard to forgive. Just as Sir Richard's conversation was better than his books, so, we are told, his diaries were better than his ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... remains grave when others laugh, or he laughs, as Horace says, "with alien jaws," by constraint rather than because he cannot help it. He has a confused idea that it is expected of him. Such laughter is apparently the outcome of an uneasy sense of duty, a dismal travesty of the real thing.... ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... there was no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggrel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. Such a caricature was ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... available streets in the City Plan. The flippant carelessness with which this apparent union has been effected only serves to emphasise the actual separation. In almost every case these ill-advised couplings are productive of anomalous disorder, which in the case of the numbered streets they openly travesty the requirements of communal propriety and of common-sense: as may be inferred from the fact that within this disjointed region Fourth Street crosses Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth streets very nearly at right angles—to the permanent bewilderment of ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... woman's garment. Parachoregema. Subordinate chorus, which sings in the absence of the principal one. Aristullos. Bad character satirized by Aristophanes, and used in one of his plays as a travesty of Plato. This incident, and Plato's amused indifference, are mentioned at p. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the book, usually after short perusal discarding the author as a "poopstick," a favourite phrase with him. I remember this occurring with the Rejected Addresses, though he knew and loved James Smith. A travesty of Omar Khayyam, called The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten, he read delightedly, much preferring it to the original. He professed contempt for the study of English grammar, more especially for the scientific analysis of English sentence-structure, which plays so large a part in modern ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men. The latter's first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. This reversal of the natural situation ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... drawing-room of one of her father's friends at Market Dalling. It was called "The Gambler's Wife." She had always thought it a very pretty and pathetic picture; but she no longer thought it so; in fact, it now appeared to her to be a ridiculous travesty of life. Gamblers were just like other people, neither better nor worse—and often infinitely more lovable ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking, and count it the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... world, anything resembling the injustice of a civilisation which, of set purpose, excludes from the only redemption flesh and blood can inherit, that sad rear-guard whose besetting sin is poverty. Yet John Knox's wildest travesty of eternal justice never rivalled in flagrancy the moving principle of a civilisation which exists merely to build on extrinsic bases an impracticable barrier between class and class: on one side, the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... round his neck as for his toes to protrude through his boots. He gave one the impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb—the inborn and incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of it and scheming out a portrait in which that ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... I give?" but "How much can I gain?" and so it has expressed itself in these re-entering curves. It has not even ventured to throw itself boldly outward, as do other thoughts, but projects half-heartedly from the astral body, which must be supposed to be on the left of the picture. A sad travesty of the divine quality love; yet even this is a stage in evolution, and distinctly an improvement upon earlier stages, ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... Government emphatically and categorically denounce as lies many statements made in the German official reports on the fighting in the Verdun theatre. Although, they say, the Germans usually travesty the truth, they have not before issued such ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... as that of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. It was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... see, now, that the hump atop each rounded body was a travesty of a head, hairless, and without a neck. Their features were particularly hideous, and I shall pass over a description as ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... patisserie in the Rue de la Paroisse that we noticed an uninviting compound labelled "Pudding Anglais, 2 fr. 1/2 kilo." A little thought led us to recognise in this amalgamation a travesty of our old friend plum-pudding; but so revolting was its dark, bilious-looking exterior that we felt its claim to be accounted a compatriot almost insulting. And it was with secret gratification that towards the close of January ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... respect of attention, marching with her fellows under common conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and out among the crowd, she looked abandoned, the sight of her in her bare white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her sleep. She had on her arm a sheaf of the ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... readily infer that Shakespeare found little to sympathize with in this somewhat extravagant outline of a happy nation, but he goes out of his way to travesty it. In "The Tempest" he makes Gonzalo, the noblest character in the play, hold the following language to the inevitable king (Shakespeare can not imagine even a desert island ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... between Great Britain and the United States previous to the war of 1812, and reflecting the popular feeling with regard to some of the English tourists who overran us after the conclusion of peace. In this ponderous travesty John Bull of Bullock is England, and Brother Jonathan the United States; Napoleon figures as Beau Napperty, Louis XVI. as Louis Baboon, and France as Frogmore. It could not have been a hard thing to write in its day, and we suppose that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... doctor, for there was no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... "You set me aside. You have no thoughts for me—no words. Yet you can talk when you go to the trading-house. You have words and to spare for the trader. You can drink with him. You can sing, 'Drink with me a cup of wine.'" He lifted his raucous old voice in ludicrous travesty of the favorite catch, for sometimes the two Britons, so incongruous in point of age, education, sentiment, and occupation, cemented their bond as compatriots by carousing together in a ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... said to himself, "that the fine woman I married—for she was a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!—should have died to present the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront to the family! Ah! the strain will show! They say your sins will find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she bewitched me! I was bewitched!—Curse the little ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaides" that was making a furor—a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Academie Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds; and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it is impossible ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... story grew up that his soul had visited hell during a prolonged fainting fit after which he recovered and became a devout Buddhist. See chap. XI of the Romance called Hsi-yu-chi, a fantastic travesty of Hsuan Chuang's travels, and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... could tell the hour of his fate. The people lived from day to day and left their homes not knowing whether they should return to them or whether they should be dragged from the streets and thrown into the dungeons of that travesty of courts, the Revolutionary Committee, more terrible and more bloody than those of the Mediaeval Inquisition. We who were strangers in this distraught land were not saved from its persecutions and I personally lived ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... be treated as a schoolgirl whose education required finishing! She could hear Gervase's derisive laughter, the amused chuckle with which he would say, "Silly girl, serve you right!" Across the room Cynthia and Betty were sniggering, and biting their lips. This was indeed a travesty of what she had expected. The blood flamed in her cheeks, but ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... deny that he killed Richardson, yet he was acquitted on the plea of insanity, and was, at the same time, made the legal guardian of his child, a boy, then, twelve years of age, and walked out of the court with him, hand in hand. What a travesty on justice and common sense that, while a man is declared too insane to be held responsible for taking the life of another, he might still be capable of directing the life and education of a child! And ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Kentucky, buying here a boy, there a girl; and other hearts are torn, other families are dispersed, other nameless crimes are accomplished coolly, simply, legally: it is the necessary revenue of the one, it is the indispensable supply of the others. Must not the South live, and how dares any one travesty a fact so simple? by what right was penned that eloquent ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... Laughter,' 'Good Old English Fun and Frolic,' placarded in vermilion letters on the gate. He went into the pit, and saw the lovely Mrs. Leary, as usual, in a man's attire; and that eminent buffo actor, Tom Horseman, dressed as a woman. Horseman's travesty seemed to him a horrid and hideous degradation; Mrs. Leary's glances and ankles had not the least effect. He laughed again, and bitterly, to himself, as he thought of the effect which she had produced upon him, on the ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hard chocolate,' he said, in his voice that was as if laughing, because of the unblemished stillness and force which was the reality in him. She would have to touch him. To speak, to see, was nothing. It was a travesty to look and to comprehend the man there. Darkness and silence must fall perfectly on her, then she could know mystically, in unrevealed touch. She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have the knowledge which is death ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... and English in Hamilton. Hardly any Frenchman could have borne to put even a fictitious eidolon of himself in such a contemptible light; very few Englishmen, though they might easily have done this, would have done it so neatly, and with so quaint a travesty of romantic situation. But the main story, as admitted above, is assommant, though, just before the breach, a substitution of three agreeable damsels for the nymph herself ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... are not uncommon today and are of two different kinds. First, there is the burlesque that is travesty, which takes a well-known and often serious subject and hits off its famous features in ways that are uproariously funny. "When Caesar Sees Her," took the famous meeting between Cleopatra and Marc Antony and made even the most impressive moment a scream. [1] ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... frightened soubrette; of the heaven-defying AEschylean Prometheus hiding under an umbrella from the thunderbolts of Zeus. And they must have felt instinctively what only a laborious erudition reveals to us, the sudden subtle modulations of the colloquial comic verse into mock-heroic travesty of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... distinguished across the room cause visual cramp; and the rearing horse which keeps one longing for the rockers cannot be called reposeful. Any picture in which one seeks in vain the rest and peace and quietude and inspiration which the home harmony demands, is but a travesty of art—domestically speaking. There is probably nothing more rest-giving than the marine view, and next come the pretty pastoral and cool woodland scenes, while madonnas and other pictures of religious significance express their own worth—just a few choice, well-selected ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... anarchism is to destroy force by force; the aim of Tolstoy is to allow force to do its worst. Such a spirit of non-resistance would mean the overthrow of all security, and the reversion to wild lawlessness. It is an utter travesty of Christ's teaching. Extremes meet. Violence and servility join hands. Anarchism and Tolstoyism reveal the total bankruptcy of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... him on, not in any failure by others or by the State to do justice to him or his. He is a malefactor and nothing else. He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a "product of social conditions," save as a highwayman is "produced" by the fact than an unarmed man happens to have a purse. It is a travesty upon the great and holy names of liberty and freedom to permit them to be invoked in such a cause. No man or body of men preaching anarchistic doctrines should be allowed at large any more than ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,—a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" in the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... curious satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan, commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one hundred pounds (Scots, no doubt), arrears of the pension due to him from the Abbey ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... most ingenious pen has been all too seldom employed on children's books. Indeed, one that comes first to memory, the "New Sandford and Merton" (1872), is hardly entitled to be classed among them, but the travesty of the somewhat pedantic narrative, interspersed with fairly amusing anecdotes, that Thomas Day published in 1783, is superb. No matter how familiar it may be, it is simply impossible to avoid laughing anew at the smug little Harry, the sanctimonious tutor, or the naughty Tommy, as Mr. Sambourne ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... woman is rarely hanged for infanticide, and it is a mere travesty of justice to pass on her the death sentence, well knowing that it will never ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... Nicholson", edited by John Fitz Victor. The name of the supposititious nephew reminds us of "Original Poems" by Victor and Cazire, and raises the question whether the poems in that lost volume may not have partly furnished forth this Oxford travesty. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... "The hymns which he translated from the Latin into German may be unreservedly praised, as also those which he composed for the members of his own communion. He did not travesty the sacred Word nor set his anger to music. He is grave, simple, solemn, and grand. He was at once the poet and musician of a great number of ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice of pained protest) This is no place for indecent levity at the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such familiarities as the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on the Taking of Namur" and "The ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... poverty of his wit is thus enriched by his complacency in dealing it out. His part indeed amply pays its way, in showing how much of mirth may be caused by feebleness in a great attempt at a small matter. Besides, in him the mother element of the whole piece runs out into broad humour and travesty; his reasons for breaking with his master the Jew being, as it were, a variation in drollery upon the fundamental air of the play. Thus he exhibits under a comic form the general aspect of surrounding humanity; while ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... soldiers, policemen, magistrates, and society generally; and he is almost invariably fond of dangling a sword or other weapon, and wearing some kind of uniform, for the assumption of militarism without severe toil delights him. But it is in a degenerate travesty of the ancient labour of hunting where, at terrible risk to himself, and with endless fatigue, his ancestors supplied the race with its meat and defended it from destruction by wild beasts) that he finds his greatest satisfaction; it serves to render the ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... frontispiece—rather an advertisement—of Victor Hugo's Les Chatiments. It is as sinister, as malign as a Rops. The big book, title displayed, crushes to earth a vulture which is a travesty of the Napoleonic beak. Daumier was a power in Paris. Albert Wolff, the critic of Figaro, tells how he earned five francs each time he provided a text for a caricature by Daumier, and Philipon, who founded several journals, actually claimed a share in Daumier's success because he wrote ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... expectant audience, brown and white, who applauded loudly when the Pahi Minstrels emerged from a little boarded room in one corner, and took up their positions on the platform at the end of the hall. Then, for two mortal hours, there was a dismal and lugubrious travesty of the performances of that world-famous troupe which never performs out ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... aloof from the proceedings which, beginning on Saturday the 20th of January 1649, terminated so dismally on Tuesday the 30th. The strange part played by Lady Fairfax on the first day of the so-called trial (though it was no greater a travesty of justice than many a real trial both before and after) is one of the best-known stories in English history. There are several versions of it. Having provided herself with a seat in a small gallery in Westminster Hall, just above the heads of the judges, when her husband's name ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... he began to call on God with terrific fervour, in an intense and resounding voice. I was struck suddenly by the irony of it all. Why have a legislature when Colonel Paul Varney was so efficient! The legislature was a mere sop to democratic prejudice, to pray over it heightened the travesty. Suppose there were a God after all? not necessarily the magnified monarch to whom these pseudo-democrats prayed, but an Intelligent Force that makes for righteousness. How did He, or It, like to be trifled with in this way? And, if He existed, would not His disgust be immeasurable as He contemplated ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... guarantor of the canal, including, of course, the building of the canal, and of its peaceful use by all the world. The enterprise was recognized everywhere as responding to an international need. It was a mere travesty on justice to treat the government in possession of the Isthmus as having the right—which Secretary Cass forty-five years before had so emphatically repudiated—to close the gates of intercourse on one of the great highways of the world. When we ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... I added, with no great relevancy, that my wife and I were renewing the fond emotion of our first trip down the St. Lawrence in the character of bridal pair which we had spurned when it was really ours. I explained that we had left the children with my wife's aunt, so as to render the travesty more lifelike; and when he said, "I suppose you miss them, though," I gave him my card. He tried to find one of his own to give me in return, but he could only find a lot of other people's cards. He wrote his name on the back of one, and handed it to me with a smile. "It won't do for me ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... "Protoplasm" is a question of history, so far as it is a name; of fact, so far as it is a thing. Dr. Stirling, has not taken the trouble to refer to the original authorities for his history, which is consequently a travesty; and still less has he concerned himself with looking at the facts, but contents himself with taking them also at second-hand. A most amusing example of this fashion of dealing with scientific statements is furnished by Dr. Stirling's ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... riband and the white enamel stag, whose antlers bore the diamond cross of the order of St. Hubertus. The little hat was strangely like a crown; the baton of the Landhofmeisterin's office, which she held in her hand, resembled a sceptre: it was of gold, and ablaze with precious stones. A travesty, no doubt, an absurdity, an insolence, but how fine it all looked! The Duke wore a white satin long-coat, embroidered with gold, and on his breast shone the St. Hubertus stag and cross. Truly the prince of some fable, seated beside ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... until the home loses its hold upon him and he selfishly indulges his appetite, no matter who suffers. We are faced with actual conditions and no substitutes of better kept saloons or purer beverages can help very much. It is a travesty of the truth to call a saloon a working men's club; it is his destruction. What is actually needed is a reform which will send men, who frequent saloons back to their homes. The real problem is not how to reform the saloon, ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... third baseman—a large one at that, too—used it to such advantage that it was next to impossible for a ball hit to his position to get by him. At times it was simply laughable to see him stop ground hits. To wear such gloves is making a travesty of skilful infield work in stopping hard hit, bounding or ground balls. But with the speedy batting of the hard ball now in use, the stopping of hard hit balls in the infield becomes dangerous to the fingers without the aid of small gloves. But no such glove as the catcher's ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... the barbaric splendour of an Eastern queen; presently she would be wearing the black hood, pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe of a Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen guarded as holy relics in a chamber of the Louvre; last travesty of all (and it was in this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman, clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man's hat set rakishly on her dainty head. He would fain spend his life in these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians, Corneille, Shakespeare, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... often dispensed by country magistrates is a disgraceful travesty of right and wrong, yet we still have in England justice in the criminal courts," I said. "Rest assured that no jury will convict an innocent woman of the ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. It was a good ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... imitation of a priest's tonsure, and its body clothed in a mock ecclesiastical vestment, with cross before and behind, whilst a piece of white paper to represent a singing-cake was placed between its forefeet, which had been tied together. Bonner was very angry at this travesty of religion, and caused the effigy to be publicly displayed at Paul's Cross during sermon time. A reward of twenty marks was offered for the discovery of this atrocious act, but with what success we do ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... Mr. Drew. "If it is a good story, well told, then it is a comedy, but if it has no story or cannot be told humorously, then no amount of bolstering will ever make it into a comedy. You may add a lot of knockabout and perhaps get an acceptable farce, or you can write in sensation and get travesty, but you cannot by these means change the unfit into comedy, and the broad use of 'comedy' to apply to anything intended to be diverting is a misuse of an ancient and honorable word.... To my way of thinking comedy is first of all ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... phase to-day. And most of the aggressions and annexations of the modern period have arisen out of the inconveniences and reasonable fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the eighteenth century was a dangerous political muddle, uncertain of her monarchy, her policy, her affinities. She endangered her neighbours because there was no guarantee ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... trackless region, firstly on Gershom himself, and secondly on his residence. These names were obtained from the intensity of their respective characters, in favor of the beverage named. L'eau de mort was the place termed by the voyagers, in a sort of pleasant travesty on the eau de vie of their distant, but still well-remembered manufactures on the banks of the Garonne. Ben Boden, however, paid but little attention to the drawling remarks of Gershom Waring. This was not the first time he had heard of ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... to him, but to those who come after him, with a wider knowledge of the properties of matter and the nature of living beings, and a wholly different attitude towards such problems, the primitive man's solution may seem merely a ludicrous travesty. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the Intellect that ruled the tribe, the super-termite, the master mind of the mound! This travesty of a termite! This thing with wasted limbs and torso, and with enormous, voracious brain that drained all sustenance constantly from the body! It was, in the insect world, a parallel to the dream that present-day Man sometimes ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... things life cruelly brings to men, without futile struggling, without contemptible pretence. Quite calmly, quite serenely, he had accepted the snows of middle age. He had not secretly groaned or cursed, railed against destiny, striven to defy it by travesty, as do many men. He had thought himself to be "above" all that—until lately. But now, as he thought of the fire, he was conscious of an immense sadness that had in it something of passion, or a regret that was, for a moment, desperate, bitter, that seared, that tortured, that was scarcely ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Mrs. Behn prefixed to her lover's watch; among the rest, Mr. Charles Cotton, author of Virgil Travesty, throws in his mite in her praise; though the lines are but poorly writ. But of all her admirers, Mr. Charles Gildon, who was intimately acquainted with our poetess, speaks of her with the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... Hewitt's notice by the case which I have told elsewhere as "The Affair of the Tortoise." As for me, I had read Sir Spenser St. John's book on the black republic, and I had been greatly impressed by the graphic picture it gives of the horrible, blood-stained travesty of regular government there prevailing. Nothing in the worst of the South American Republics is to be remotely compared to it. In the worst periods there was not a crime imaginable that could not be, and was not, committed openly and with impunity by anybody on the right side of the so-called ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... gave the I. W. W. version in English. Some of these songs were transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in repetition. It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe's mission ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... narrow-minded and unfair as only a bigot can be. All through the examination that ensued he took a leading part, and with him, to be accused was to be set down at once as guilty. Never, among either Christian or heathen people, was there a greater travesty of justice than these examinations and trials for witchcraft, conducted by the very foremost men of ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... do not republics forget? Is fame a travesty, and the judgment of mankind a farce? America had a parallel case in Captain Nathan Hale. Of the same age as Andre, he, after graduation at Yale College with high honors, enlisted in the patriot cause at the beginning of the contest, and secured the love and confidence of all about him. When ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Nagaya's charge that he had compassed the death of the infant prince by charms and incantations. Two of the Fujiwara nobles were appointed to investigate the accusation, and they condemned the prince to die by his own hand. He committed suicide, and his wife and children died with him. The travesty of justice was carefully acted throughout. A proclamation was issued promising capital punishment to any one, of whatever rank or position, who compassed the death or injury of another by spells or incantations, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... barbarians. Their manners and customs, while lively and unconventional, are most charming. Their dress is graceful and practical, not grotesque; their soft speech is pleasing to the ear. Their flag is the original flag of the Republic of Texas; it is definitely not a barbaric travesty of our own emblem. And the underlying premises of their political system should, as far as possible, be incorporated into the organization of the Solar League. Here politics is an exciting and exacting game, in which ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... Field was safely off for Fremont we started to produce a column that would be a travesty on his favorite expressions at the expense of his titled friends. We opined and violated all the confidences of which we were possessed in regard to Colonel Phocion Howard, of the Batavia frog-farm, Major Moses P. Handy, the flaming sword of the Philadelphia Press, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... imagination to conceive. Would to God I had never tried to find out! But no man standing where Roberts does to-day among the leaders of a great party can fall into such a pit of shame without weakening the faith of the young and making a travesty of ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... a rude resemblance to that of a seated man, which had evidently at some remote period, been sculptured out of a solid block of black marble seemingly springing vertically out of the ground. There was nothing artistic in the conception or execution of the image, which was a mere travesty of the human figure, every member being absurdly out of proportion, while the only features upon the modelling of which any pains had been taken were those of the face, the expression of which hideously suggested the extremes ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... "What a travesty my efforts at pride are with you!" she cried. "I begin by trying to preserve some proper dignity, and end by confessing abject poverty. I yet have the ten you paid me the other day, but twenty-four dollars are not much to set up housekeeping on, and I would be more glad ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... he tells me that, so far, the occupation has been a travesty of any military operation. No plan; no administration; much confusion; troops immobile and likely to sit for weeks upon the beach. The Balkan States Intelligence Officers are on the spot and grasp the inferences. Until the troops landed they ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... if you will join us." At this I glanced at our dresses in some confusion, which being observed by the gentleman, he hastened to say: "You need be under no anxiety about your appearance, for this is a costume night, and the greater number of our guests are in travesty." As he spoke he threw open the door of a large drawing-room and invited us in. On entering we found a company of men and women, well-dressed, some in ordinary evening attire and some costumed. The room was brilliantly lighted and beautifully furnished and decorated. At ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... others, have lost their nearest and dearest in the war, but they still have to dance. Of course they call themselves "The Allies," and one saw rather a stale ballet-girl in very sketchy clothes dancing with a red, yellow, and black flag draped across her. Poor Belgium! It was such a travesty ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... years' time. The Republican senatorial cabal insists that the treaty be Americanized. Suppose that Italy asked that it be Italianized— France that it be Frenchized—Britain that it be Britainized, and so on down the line. The whole thing would result in a perfect travesty. ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... Uncle Sam's pocket with one hand and with the other clutches the bread-money out of the tremblin' weak fingers of the poor. Is our law," sez I, "a travesty, a vain sham, that a man that steals millions for greed goes unpunished, while a man who steals a loaf to keep his children from starvin' is punished by our laws and scorfed at? Monopoly makes the poor pay tribute ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... canter across country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship among his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing of the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport, served as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It has the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in the saddle at least once in the year and compelling them to do some rough riding. The English have always made it their boast that they are more at home on horseback than any other European nation, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... you could have seen our army nowhere more discreditably represented than in this Castle of Edinburgh. And I used to see myself in fancy, and blush. It seemed that my more elegant carriage would but point the insult of the travesty. And I remembered the days when I wore the coarse but honourable coat of a soldier; and remembered further back how many of the noble, the fair, and the gracious had taken a delight to tend my childhood.... But I must not recall these tender and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... critic's sense of humor almost as much as the verses themselves. It is true that while differing utterly in his tone of mind, and his attitude toward the mediaeval stories, from that of the mediaeval artists and sculptors,—whose gargoyles and other grotesques were carved without a thought of travesty on anything religious,—he is at one with them in combining extreme irreverence of form with a total lack of irreverence of spirit toward the real spiritual mysteries of religion. He burlesques saints and devils alike, mocks ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the British select their island home; destiny and history were again the determining factors. But it would be a travesty of the truth to assert that Germany has not envied her that position, together with the advantages arising from it. Yet in the same degree as the inhabitants of these islands have used the "talents" entrusted to them through their ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... manifest consciousness of the ludicrous that these industrials now do their little drama of the war-dance and the oration and the council-smoke. That drama has degenerated into a very feeble farce now, and the actors in it would be quite outdone in their travesty by any average corps of "supes" at one of our theatres. By-and-by all this will have died out, and the "Indian side" of the stream at Lorette will be assimilated in all its features to the other. The moccason is already typifying the decadence of aboriginal things there. That article is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... that any writers should turn to the travesty of the Baldr story given in the almost worthless saga of Hromund Gripsson in support of a theory. In it "Bildr" is killed by Hromund, who has the sword Mistilteinn. It must be patent to any one that this is a perverted version of a story which the ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... has more human nature? not studied with the microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight, with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right. And, once ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... persons of domestic life; out of the stuff of which they made their emperors, their heroes, and their princesses, they cut out a pompous country justice, a hectoring tailor, or an impudent mantua-maker; but it was not merely this travesty of great personages, nor the lofty effusions of one in a lowly station, which terminated the object of parody. It was designed for a higher object, that of more obviously exposing the original for any absurdity in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... actuated by some dreadful, unclean force. Breed knew it for some sort of poisoning, and his muscles bunched for flight. Shady barked angrily as if to drive the thing away. Then Breed saw a hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a draw and halt directly in the path of the mad coyote. Cripp stood there grinning till he felt the other's teeth score his unprotected hide; then he whirled and snapped back at him. The mad coyote kept straight ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... possess, becomes conscious that she can always arouse interest by the severity of her bodily sufferings. The suggestion acts upon her unstable mind, and forthwith she becomes paralysed, or a cripple, or dumb, presenting a mimicry or travesty of some bodily ailment with which she is more or less familiar. "Hysterical" girls will even apply caustic to the skin in order to produce some strange eruption which, while it sorely puzzles us doctors, will excite widespread interest ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... at carrying a love of the beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant aspects. The great success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, "Patience," produced in 1881, was also to some extent due to the humorous allusions to the extravagances of the "Aesthetetes." ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... car the long line of more sober folk, the older fisherman, the women in caps and many-hued skirts, the serious townfolk who had scorned the travesty, yet would not be left out of the procession. They all began to march, to the tune of those noisy brass trumpets which were thundering forth snatches ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of my good friend Dr. Duchat. If that excellent man had not long since died he should have shared in my triumph. I took Stepan to my home and plied the saw and the knife. could operate on that poor, worthless, useless, hopeless travesty of humanity as fearlessly and as recklessly as upon a dog bought or caught for vivisection. That was a little more than twenty years ago. To-day Stepan Borovitch wields more power than any other man on the face of the earth. In ten years he will be the autocrat of Europe, the master of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... non-producers are included all manner of thieves, pick-pockets, burglars, sharpers, prostitutes, Peers of Parliament, their families and menials, all, or nearly all, the 'six hundred and odd scoundrels of the House of Commons,' the twenty thousand State parsons, who every Sunday shamelessly travesty the Christian religion in the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... a History I was writing of this Witchcraft; and though she had, before this, read it over and over, yet now she could not read (I believe) one entire sentence of it; but she made of it the most ridiculous Travesty in the world, with such a patness and excess of fancy, to supply the sense that she put upon it, as I was amazed at. And she particularly told me, That I should quickly come to ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... him go. The colloquy had not only done me no service, but had positively emboldened him—or so I seemed to perceive as the weeks went on—in his efforts to cast off his old slough and become a travesty of me, as he had been a travesty of my uncle. I am willing to believe that they caused him pain. A crust of habit so inveterate as his cannot be rent without throes, to the severity of which his facial contortions bore witness whenever he attempted a witticism. ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... but representations made by his son showed beyond a doubt that he was and had been for two years of unsound mind. To convict a man of misdemeanors for which he was not morally responsible seemed a travesty on justice. Yet there was no other constitutional device for removing him. Though Pickering never appeared in person, the managers for the House pressed the prosecution; and rather than leave the administration of justice to a demented judge, the Senate pronounced the unhappy man "guilty as charged," ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... awoke to the terrible travesty of justice which was going on. Magistrates were seen to have overlooked the most flagrant instances of falsehood and contradiction on the part of both accusers and accused, using the baseless hypothesis that the devil had warped their ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... almost total lack of resentment amongst the victims consigned here by an infamous travesty of justice. Madame Akimova, for instance, a plain but homely-looking person, seemed devoted to the care of her miserable little household to the exclusion of all mundane matters. I sometimes wondered, as I sat in her hut, and watched the pale, patient little woman ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... were heard pattering across the bare floor, Ambrose would drink the bat's blood he had collected, sniff the wolfbane he had ground to ash, and pronounce the obscure Celtic words that would alter the very atoms of his flesh, transforming them into an obscene travesty of life. Brother Lorenzo, when he opened the door, would be met not by a fellow human being, but by a snarling fanged wolf that would hurl its hairy bulk at ...
— G-r-r-r...! • Roger Arcot
... is awful!" said Dorothy. She was shivering, and sick with terror at this unseemly midnight revelry of her grandfather's old mill. It was as if it had awakened in a fit of delirium, and given itself up to a wild travesty of its years of ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... pinnacle of undeserved pre-eminence the cigar, and still more the cigarette ... why should it be considered a mark of vulgarity, of plebeianism, to inhale tobacco-smoke through the stem of a briar, and the hall-mark of good breeding to finger a cigar or dally with that triviality and travesty of the adoration of My Lady Nicotine—a cigarette?" To these questions there can be but one answer: and the future, there can be little doubt, will emphasize that answer, and ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... realize all that, to feel the degradation of her nature, to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning in an iron winter dark—to experience that in your spirit and put it into durable metal, hard stone—is to hold beauty in ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... garden which, although inferior to ours, is far better than that at Amsterdam, while it converts The Hague's Zoo into a travesty. Last spring the lions were in splendid condition. They are well housed, but fewer distractions are provided for them than in Regent's Park. I found myself fascinated by the herons, who were continually soaring out over the neighbouring houses and returning like ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... march of Jews. The fishmongers, who, from their proximity to the Ghetto, were aware of its customs, enriched the Carnival with divers other parodies; now it was a travesty of a rabbi's funeral, now a long cavalcade of Jews galloping upon asses, preceded by a mock rabbi on horseback, with his head to the steed's tail, which he grasped with one hand, while with the other he offered an imitation ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... them over the steep headland of Kirk Maughold. Before he reached the top of the ascent he had been an hour on the road, and the night was near to morning. He had seen no one after leaving Ramsey, except a drunken miner with his bundle on his stick, marching home to a tipsy travesty of some ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... corrupting them so that they were hardly recognizable. Things that he remembered having said were continually meeting him during the few days of his second visit, and it shocked him deeply to meet some gross travesty of his own words, or of words more sacred than his own, and yet to be unable to correct it. "I wonder," he said to me, "that no one has ever hit on this as a punishment for ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... writer. The chances are ten to one that the conversation is mainly manufactured in the brain of the narrator, and that the quotation is either not written by the author to whom it is attributed, or else is a travesty of his real language. It is Lord Byron who tells of that numerous class of sciolists whom ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... dabbed at her nose with a ridiculous travesty of a handkerchief. "Be so kind," she said in a tearful voice, though her eyes were quite dry and, if ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... And yet during these golden days the thought of love, in the ordinary sense of the word, never entered Jane's mind. Her ignorance in this matter arose, not so much from inexperience, as from too large an experience of the travesty of the real thing; an experience which hindered her from recognising love itself, now that love in its most ideal form was ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... towards Miss Schley with an expression of quiet observation—a little indifferent—on her white face. Even Sir Donald, who was next to her, and who once—in the most definite moment of Miss Schley's ingenious travesty—looked at her for an instant, could not discern that she was aware of what was amusing ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... British Monarch, the President of France, the King of the Belgians, the Kaiser (for the United States had not then entered the war), and, I think, some others, put in an appearance, each accompanied by his Paphian escort, his standard, and the appropriate national air. Apprehending that this symbolic travesty must, almost inevitably, end in a grand orgy of Yankee-Doodleism, I was impelled to flee the place before the thing should happen. Yet a horrid fascination held me there to watch the working up of "patriotic" sentiment by the old, cheap, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... It was a travesty on running, to be sure, but it was the best he could do. He staggered and stumbled; he lurched rapidly ahead for a little space and then moved with halting steps. His limbs grew weak, his breath came in gasps, and the pain in his side was cutting him ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... would be travesty on politeness if I were to ask you to be seated, so we may stand up to each other and talk it over. In the first place, I have no apology to make. In the second place, I cannot give an explanation that would be satisfactory to you. Last night I said I would hold you to account if Mr. Savage ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... yet, in his literature, he must express himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tales. In no one of these cases were these young men on an equality in any way with Mr. Wilde. Mr. Wilde had told them that there was something beautiful and charming about youth which led him to make these acquaintances. That was a travesty of the facts. Mr. Wilde preferred to know nothing of these young men and their antecedents. He knew nothing about Wood; he knew nothing about Parker; he knew nothing about Scarfe, nothing about Conway, and not ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... was still shivering, shaking in every limb, her skin all goose-flesh. Dragging after her her travesty of a tail, she jumped onto the kitchen-table which she shook with ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar
... the representative of one of our philanthropic societies had arrested an agent who had committed a crime. It was so clear a case that he was found guilty at once. Let us hear this travesty of justice. The law required a fine and imprisonment both. The fine was placed by the Judge at twenty-five cents, which the Judge paid himself. The term of the imprisonment he made one day, and told the Sheriff to allow the jail, in this case, to be ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... that followed was a repetition of the "stunts" for which the various members of the little circle were famous and which were always performed for Mrs. Gray's pleasure. "Oakdale's Great Mystery," of which Hippy calmly admitted the authorship, proved to be a ridiculous travesty on a melodrama which the boys had seen the previous winter. Hippy as the much-vaunted Mystery, with a handkerchief mask, a sweeping red portiere cloak, and an ultra-mysterious shuffle was received with shrieks of laughter by the audience. The dramatic manner in which, after a series ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... sand lay the chalk-white skeleton of a man, the grinning mouth and sightless eyes staring up at me in a hideous travesty of mirth; and all around between the outstretched bones lay diamonds, diamonds innumerable: big, bright, sparkling beauties by the handful, wealth incredible to be had for the picking up, with no guardian other than these bare bones of ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... Amboise, being unable to find an opportunity to speak to either of the queens, and hoping to put himself in their way as the court advanced along the river-bank on its return to Blois. He disguised himself as a pauper, at the risk of being taken for a spy, and by means of this travesty, he mingled with the crowd of beggars which lined the roadway. After the departure of the Prince de Conde, and the execution of the leaders, the duke and cardinal thought they had sufficiently silenced the Reformers to allow the queen-mother a little more freedom. Lecamus knew that, instead of ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... walked along the Strand, but I did not put up my umbrella. The truth is I couldn't put up my umbrella. The frame would not work for one thing, and if it had worked, I would not have put the thing up, for I would no more be seen under such a travesty of an umbrella than Falstaff would be seen marching through Coventry with his regiment of ragamuffins. The fact is, the umbrella is not my umbrella at all. It is the umbrella of some person who I hope will read these lines. He has got ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... and factories thinned out and the open spaces increased as he approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk like a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human. It was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled like a sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... comic will be emphasised by bringing it nearer to its source. From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go back to the original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life. Already, the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests to us an image of this kind. For, as soon as we forget the serious ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... streets of Syracuse, in the quiet pursuit of his simple avocations, a colored person, as nearly "of no account'' as any ever seen. So far as was known he had no surname, and, indeed, no Christian name, save the fragment and travesty,—"Jerry.'' ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... opposition to the party in power, or criticism of its official chiefs, became criminal, under the head of "opposing" the Government. A joke or a caricature might send its author to jail as "seditious." It was surely a travesty upon liberty when a man could be arrested for expressing the wish, as a salute was fired, that the wadding might hit John Adams behind. Even libels upon government, if it is to be genuinely free, must be ignored—a principle now acted upon ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... for his toes to protrude through his boots. He gave one the impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb—the inborn and incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of it and scheming out a portrait in which ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... said nothing, but put down a piece of money; and the man behind the counter said nothing, but took the money and filled the bottles, which were hidden under the tattered shawl again, and the speechless phantoms glided out, guarding that little travesty of modesty ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... it is made in ignorance of the real conditions. Look at the farm labourer's wife and her home-life. She is often the most miserable, worn-out creature, who tries in vain to keep the children and herself properly fed and clothed. Her life is a long travesty of the laws ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Farce,' 'Roars of Laughter,' 'Good Old English Fun and Frolic,' placarded in vermilion letters on the gate. He went into the pit, and saw the lovely Mrs. Leary, as usual, in a man's attire; and that eminent buffo actor, Tom Horseman, dressed as a woman. Horseman's travesty seemed to him a horrid and hideous degradation; Mrs. Leary's glances and ankles had not the least effect. He laughed again, and bitterly, to himself, as he thought of the effect which she had produced upon him, on the first night of his arrival ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... flippant carelessness with which this apparent union has been effected only serves to emphasise the actual separation. In almost every case these ill-advised couplings are productive of anomalous disorder, which in the case of the numbered streets they openly travesty the requirements of communal propriety and of common-sense: as may be inferred from the fact that within this disjointed region Fourth Street crosses Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth streets very nearly at right angles—to the permanent bewilderment of nations and to the perennial ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... doctrine of purgation after death? They condemned Transubstantiation—did they condemn the Real Presence? They condemned a great popular system—did they condemn that of which it was a corruption and travesty? These questions could not be foreclosed, unless on the assumption that there was no doctrine on such points which could be called Catholic except the Roman. The inquiry was not new; and divines so stoutly anti-Roman as Dr. Hook ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... all apt to haunt houses. The sprites occasionally appear in their proper form, but just as often in disguise: a demon, too, can appear in human shape if so disposed: demons being of their nature deceitful and fond of travesty, as Porphyry teaches us and as Law (1680) illustrates. Whether the spirits of the dead quite know what they are about when they take to haunting, is, in the opinion of Thyraeus, a difficult question. Thomas Aquinas, following ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... his throat: "Mr. Lyman, even after a night of worried reflection, I am even now hardly able to realize the monstrous outrage that has been committed at the instance of a theologic imbecile, helped by a travesty on law enacted by a general assembly of ditch diggers ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... of business on reassembling; Truculent TIM, coming to the front at least urgent opportunity, demanded that Irish business should not be taken as first Order. OLD MORALITY promptly gave desired pledge. Then MARJORIBANKS, who, to travesty TREVELYAN's famous saying, Though a Whip, is a Scottish gentleman, broke the long pause of eloquent silence cultivated in the Lobby; protested against Scotch Members being placed in inconvenient position, by being obliged to put in appearance on first day after holidays. Welsh Members echoed ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... their first youth, they found an amusement in each other's knowing ways and conversation that kept them mutually faithful in a kind of mock-courtship. The gentleman, however, was evidently only amusing himself with this travesty of sentiment, though he was never led away by the charms of younger women. After a month of it he succeeded in persuading her for the first time to enter the water, and there he assisted her to take ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... object was reality, should have seemed an object worth recording. These letters, so full and apparently so frank, really so deceptive, are, as we have said, but one instance among many of the way in which popular writers on Japan travesty history by ignoring the part which foreigners have played. The reasons for this are not far to seek. A wonderful tale will please folks at a distance all the better if made more wonderful still. Japanese ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there's Sim Burns! what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend,—so does his wife,—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... au fait with the 'Tempest' and felt no indignation or jealousy at the travesty, it was charming; and though the audience at the rehearsal numbered few of these, the refined sweetness and power of the performers made it delightful and memorable. Every one was in raptures with the fairies, who had been beautifully drilled, and above all with their graceful little leader, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forelock of hair in a way that appeared to imitate a like peculiarity in the King, there was an outcry among the audience; and Louis-Philippe's son, who was present, was informed by complaisant courtiers that the travesty was intended as an insult to his father. The next day, Harel was advertized that the authorities forbade any other presentation of the piece; and, on the 16th, the Press, following the Government's lead, were practically ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... distorted to a guttural travesty of itself, rose to a shout on the ascending notes of the last line. Then, without pause for breath, came the voice of speech—hurried, expressionless, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... her heart almost bursting. The picture Miss Craven's words called up was an ideal of happiness that might have been. The suffering that reality promised seemed more than she could contemplate. What happiness could come from such a travesty? The strange yearnings she had experienced seemed suddenly crystallised into form, and the knowledge was a greater pain than she had known. What she would have gone down to the gates of death to give him he did not require—the unutterable joy that Miss Craven suggested would never be hers. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... destruction of rebel paraphernalia. Their only intent was against the treasonable liquor traffic. Had there been no liquor dispensing there had been no smashing. This the liquorized courts would not admit for a moment. Every ruling was a burlesque on civil law, a travesty on justice and a contemptible farce. The whole proceedings from beginning to end were ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body, only, of his message; its spirit lived—lived ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... passed through the town above which the Virgin floated with the infant Jesus in her arms. One wondered whether she was really holding him out to bless; her attitude might equally have been that of one who was flinging him down into the shambles, disgusted with this travesty on religion. ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... one reads a story, or sees a play or a moving picture, in which characters bristling with firearms are set forth as veritable representatives of life in the Canadian wilderness, he may rest assured that the work is nothing but a travesty on life in Canada. Any author, any illustrator, any playwright, any scenario writer, any actor or any director who depicts Canadian wilderness life in that way is either an ignoramus or a shameless humbug. And to add strength to my statement I shall quote the experience of a gentleman who was ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... invalid chair. There, propped up in cushions, lay a fat travesty of the old Saradokis. This was a Sara whose tawny hair was turning gray with suffering; whose mouth, once so full and boyish, was now heavy and sinister, whose buoyancy had changed to the bitter irritability ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... never expended a sigh over the loss of The Scented Garden, and we should not have minded one straw if Lady Burton had burnt also her typewritten travesty of the Catullus; but her destruction of Sir Richard's private journals and diaries was a deed that one finds it very hard to forgive. Just as Sir Richard's conversation was better than his books, so, we are told, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... impossibility of making its delicate rhythms fit into those of a dance, has a variety and sublimity of meaning so far transcending the personality of any human being, that to attempt to focus it in a dancer, no matter how charming, would be a travesty. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... waste the time, and exhaust the activity of our youth in the learning of Latin and Greek, is to very little purpose indeed. Translation! what a strange word! To me I confess it appears the most unaccountable invention, that ever entered into the mind of man. To distil the glowing conceptions, and to travesty the beautiful language of the ancients, through the medium of a language estranged to all its peculiarities and all its elegancies. The best thoughts and expressions of an author, those that distinguish one writer from another, are precisely those that are least capable ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... graphic history out of his novels. Fielding's mind had gathered coarseness, but it had not been poisoned. He sees how many ugly things are covered by the superficial gloss of fashion, but he does not condescend to travesty the facts in order to gratify a morbid taste for the horrible. When he wants a good man or woman he knows where to find them, and paints from Allen or his own wife with obvious sincerity and hearty sympathy. He is less anxious to exhibit human selfishness than to show us that an alloy ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... his pen. Wherever there was a vacant theatre—were it in Cheltenham, Birmingham, or any other town—he would engage it for his productions. One night he would play his favourite part, Romeo, with reverence and ability. The next, he would repeat his first travesty in all its hideous harlequinade. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Mr. Coates, with his vile performances, must be held responsible for the decline of dramatic art in England and the invasion of the amateur. The sight of such folly, strutting unabashed, spoilt the prestige ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... sacred opera, as Rubinstein entitles it, was written in 1870, the text, which is somewhat of a travesty on sacred history, by Julius Rodenberg. An English critic very pertinently says: "One item alone in all the multitude of details crowded by Herr Rodenberg into his canvas has any foundation in fact. ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much frightened. He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that. It's merely a travesty of the Swiss ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... twaddle, farce, travesty and by- play regarding Tommy! You know I warned you, over and over, and you mustn't blame me for the deception. I never thought you'd take it so in earnest!" and here the jovial Major again went into ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... that, to feel the degradation of her nature, to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning in an iron winter dark—to experience that in your spirit and put it into durable metal, hard stone—is to ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is mean and degrading. For example, when I was riding from Bloemfontein to Kimberley I and my companion descried a farmhouse two miles in front of us near Koodoesrand Drift; when we had come within about a mile of it a little travesty of a Union Jack was run up on a stick, and when we rode up to the door a farmer came out, smiling, rubbing his hands, sniggering—in a word, truckling. His talk was like the political swagger of the ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... typically denounced in foretelling the overthrow of that gorgeous pile. The Bible, as to its important verities and solemn doctrine, is transparent to the imagination and affections, and does not require the mediation of dumb show or scenic travesty. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... ever fear from one who is no true Muslim, from one who makes a mock and travesty of the True Faith that he may ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... my writings at a party and to pronounce an opinion upon them. He said that I wrote many things which I did not believe, and then stood aside, and was amused in a humorous mood to see that other people believed them. It would be absurd to be, or even to feel, indignant at such a travesty of my purpose as this, and indeed I think that one is never very indignant at misrepresentation unless one's mind accuses itself of its being true ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it, and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character, but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of affiliation of instinct that which is ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... the activity of our youth in the learning of Latin and Greek, is to very little purpose indeed. Translation! what a strange word! To me I confess it appears the most unaccountable invention, that ever entered into the mind of man. To distil the glowing conceptions, and to travesty the beautiful language of the ancients, through the medium of a language estranged to all its peculiarities and all its elegancies. The best thoughts and expressions of an author, those that distinguish one writer from another, are precisely those that are least capable of being translated. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... might pass, stands forth as the one calm and undisturbed actor among all those who took part in the tragic doings of that day. His judges and foes were all swayed by passion and self-interest and were ready to make travesty of justice, from the leaders of the sanhedrin who condemned him on one charge and accused him to the governor on another, to the governor himself, who appeared determined to release him if he could do it without risk of personal popularity, and who yet, in ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... only literary chanticleer? My dear friend, have you read 'Esdras'? You will find there that a certain king of Persia wrote to one 'Rathumus, a story-writer.' No doubt he was famous in his day, but,—to travesty hamlet, 'where be his stories now?' Learn, from the deep oblivion into which poor Rathumus's literary efforts have fallen, the utter mockery and uselessness ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... for dresses, cloaks, and artificial flowers; Brigitte, as usual, was patient and cheerful. We both arranged a sort of travesty; she wished to dress my hair herself; we painted and powdered ourselves freely; all that we lacked was found in an old chest that had belonged, I believe, to the aunt. In an hour we could not recognize each other. The evening passed in singing, in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a parody of the ethereal being into whom Shakspeare had refined the ancient fairy; but it is a parody which still preserves a sense of the delicate and graceful. The ancient race which appeared for the last time in this travesty of the fashion of Queen Anne, still showed some touch of its ancient beauty. Since that time no fairy has appeared without being ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of the king, had resolutely held himself aloof from the proceedings which, beginning on Saturday the 20th of January 1649, terminated so dismally on Tuesday the 30th. The strange part played by Lady Fairfax on the first day of the so-called trial (though it was no greater a travesty of justice than many a real trial both before and after) is one of the best-known stories in English history. There are several versions of it. Having provided herself with a seat in a small gallery in Westminster Hall, just above the heads of ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... belonged to the Graco Pelasgic race through all their history.9 Seneca severely satirizes the ceremony, and the popular belief which upheld it, in an elaborate lampoon called Apocolocyntosis, or the reception of Claudius among the pumpkins. The broad travesty of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... their accusers, assured that they were witches beyond all doubt, and urged to confess as the only possible chance for their lives, were easily prevailed upon to repeat any tales put into their mouths: their journeys through the air on broomsticks to attend witch sacraments—a sort of travesty on the Christian ordinance—at which the devil appeared in the shape of a "small black man"; their signing the devil's book, renouncing their former baptism, and being baptized anew by the devil, who "dipped" them in "Wenham Pond," ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... European Powers as a man whose lust of conquest was a terrible menace to all constituted authority. The oligarchies thought themselves bound to combine against him in order to reseat the Bourbons on the throne of France and restore law and order to that distracted country. What a travesty of the ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... could have held firm in face of such dejection, only eyes as alert and wakeful as those of this wayfaring boy could possibly have looked undaunted at the shabby streets with their flaunting travesty of joy exhibited in the dripping awnings of the deserted cafes, that offered Biere, Billard, and yet again Biere to an ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... What a travesty on common sense and justice is such legislation! I know there are men in this Convention shaking in their boots for fear their mothers, wives, and daughters shall have equal power with themselves; cowardly men without gallantry, who fear that woman's voice in legislation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to suit any fancies of our own; like those monks of the fourth and succeeding centuries, who saw no sanctity in family or national life; no sanctity in the natural world, and, therefore, were forced to travesty the Hebrew historians, psalmists, and prophets, with all their simple, healthy objective humanity, and politics, and poetry, into metaphorical and subjective, or, as they miscalled them, spiritual meanings, to make the Old Testament ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... assumed the position of guarantor of the canal, including, of course, the building of the canal, and of its peaceful use by all the world. The enterprise was recognized everywhere as responding to an international need. It was a mere travesty on justice to treat the government in possession of the Isthmus as having the right—which Secretary Cass forty-five years before had so emphatically repudiated—to close the gates of intercourse ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Appendix. It would have opened the eyes of some of my readers to the irreconcilable antagonism between the Roman Church and science; but though I translated and summarised my author faithfully, the result had all the appearance of a malicious travesty. I have therefore suppressed this Appendix; but with regard to Roman Catholic "Mysticism" there is no use in mincing matters. Those who find edification in signs and wonders of this kind, and think that such "supernatural phenomena," even if they were well authenticated ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... day believed what they saw, or, as our generation would put it, what they thought they saw. Very good. The vast majority of men believe, and always will believe, on the same terms. When one comes along who can partly distinguish the thing seen from that travesty or distortion of it which the thousand disturbing influences within him and without him would make him see, we call him a great philosopher. All our intellectual charts are engraved according to his observations, and we steer contentedly by them till some man whose brain rests on a still more ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... shades of copper and olive to that repulsive white where the dark blood seems to flow just beneath the skin, and bedecked in all the violence of blues and greens, reds and yellows, some in country costume, their heads covered with kerchiefs, others in a travesty on the prevailing fashion, stood in their shops or behind the long double row of temporary stalls, vociferating at the passers by as they called attention to fowl, meats, hot soup, fruit, vegetables, wild birds, fish, cigars, sugar cakes, castor oil, cloth, handkerchiefs, and wood. Many ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... that buffoon that travesties the travesty? Who is that old cripple alighted from his donkey-cart, who dispenses doggrel and grimaces in all the glory ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... only in so far as we see, touch, hear, taste, and smell them; and by the psychologist, when he tells us that, in sensation, the external world is revealed as directly as it is possible that it could be revealed. But it is a travesty on this truth to say that we do not know things, but know only our sensations of sight, touch, ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... garment. Parachoregema. Subordinate chorus, which sings in the absence of the principal one. Aristullos. Bad character satirized by Aristophanes, and used in one of his plays as a travesty of Plato. This incident, and Plato's amused indifference, are mentioned at ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of gloom and sadness to say that things are going badly with them in the outer world, and who act as if they supposed that no joy can be too exuberant and no elation too lofty if, on the other hand, things are going rightly. It is a miserable travesty of the Christian faith to suppose that its prime purpose is anything else than to put into our hands the power of ruling ourselves because we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the yellow, fear-distorted face of Mark Fenwick peeped out into the corridor. He came shambling along on tottering limbs, and his coarse mouth twitched horribly. It seemed to Vera as if she were looking at a mere travesty of the man who so short a time ago had been so strong ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... line of apostolical succession, some mystic power for administering rites and conferring absolution, together with those who came beneath the touch of their priestly hands. That theory has notoriously broken down. But the truth of which it is a grotesque travesty is presented in our Lord's conception of the vine, deeply planted in the dark grave of Joseph's garden, which had reached down its branches through the ages, and in which every believing soul has a part. Touch Christ, become one with Him in living union, abide in Him, and you are one with the ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... many works, the aim of all being to infuse into the masses a contempt of the received Scriptures. He issued a travesty of the New Testament under the title of The New Testament, or The Newest Instructions from God through Jesus and his Apostles. He did just what he pleased with the miracles and words of Christ. He would convert dialogue into ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... individuals would be best able to take care of themselves. The aim of anarchism is to destroy force by force; the aim of Tolstoy is to allow force to do its worst. Such a spirit of non-resistance would mean the overthrow of all security, and the reversion to wild lawlessness. It is an utter travesty of Christ's teaching. Extremes meet. Violence and servility join hands. Anarchism and Tolstoyism reveal the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... SUPERSTITION peculiar to her. Alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is—he finds that it rather DESTROYS than saves!—It is possible that under the holy fable and travesty of the life of Jesus there is hidden one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LOVE: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most craving heart, that never had enough of any human love, that DEMANDED love, that ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... text "Ms wa Mzi," the latter wordvexatious, troublesome. [I notice that in the MS. the name is distinctly and I believe purposely spelt with Hamzah above the Ww and Kasrah beneath the Sn, reading "Muus." It is, therefore, a travesty of the name Ms, and the exact counterpart of "Muhsin", being the active participle of "asa", 4th form of "sa,"he did evil, he injured, and nearly equivalent with the following "Muuz." The two names may perhaps be rendered: Muhsin, the Beneficent, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... doors, of insufficient food, of waning hope—had come over Desiree. She listened heedlessly to the sounds in the streets through which the dead were passing to the Oliva Gate, while the living danced by in their hideous travesty of rejoicing. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... recognise the broad simple theme of Italy's struggle for deliverance. The Patriot and Instans Tyrannus both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically humorous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in neither. Both are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which thrills us in The Italian in England and the third scene of Pippa Passes. This "tyrant" has nothing to do with the Austrian whom Luigi ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature. It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would a camp-meeting hymn the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... tenet of material fire—did that exclude every doctrine of purgation after death? They condemned Transubstantiation—did they condemn the Real Presence? They condemned a great popular system—did they condemn that of which it was a corruption and travesty? These questions could not be foreclosed, unless on the assumption that there was no doctrine on such points which could be called Catholic except the Roman. The inquiry was not new; and divines so stoutly anti-Roman as Dr. Hook and Mr. W. Palmer of Worcester had ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... insist on truth as the foundation of our national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home business. Here is something for them to do—the regeneration of society by ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... a grand speech to the jury that would make 'em all blubber and acquit Pete without leaving the box, on the grounds of emotional or erratic insanity—or whatever it is that murderers get let off on when their folks are well fixed. He sputters quite a lot about this monstrous travesty on justice before they can drill the real facts into his head; and even then he keeps coming back to ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... If you are afraid of tragedy, you ought never to have joined me in starting upon such a story. Even what has never happened must be made to seem actual to be successful. The art of fiction is to imitate truth with absolute fidelity, not to travesty it. In such circumstances the man's love would be ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... is neither to be expected nor desired that you should be ruled by an undeveloped race, ignorant of law, letters, history, politics, political economy. There is no right anywhere in numbers or unintelligence to rule intelligence. It is a travesty of civilization. No Northern State that I know of would submit to be ruled by an undeveloped race. And human nature is exactly in the South what it is in the North. That is one impregnable fact, to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this travesty of battle maintained. Then the Indian fire slackened, and finally ceased altogether. Believing the affair to be merely a temporary outbreak of a few hot-headed savages, that must quickly blow over, Gladwyn took advantage of this lull in the storm ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... of love and charity rushed into sudden blossoming,—she found that her inexperienced hands must deal. She, whose wifehood was all joy and sanity, all sweet and mysterious deepening of the color of life, encountered now the hideous travesty of wifehood and motherhood, met by immature, ill- nourished bodies, and ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... or in any other, merit the same commendation? For the rest, Pope's own immortal "Dunciad," though doubtless more immediately suggested by a personal satire of Dryden's, is in one sense a kind of travesty of the "House of Fame,"—A "House ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... communion. I do not like much to meet these holy things in a romance; but at least, when one speaks of them, he need not travesty them by his language. Is there in this adulterous woman going to communion anything of the repentant faith of a Magdalene? No, no; she is always the same passionate woman, seeking illusions and seeking them even among the most ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... "language of flowers" should, to be complete, give a chapter on their political significance. England had her War of the Roses; and of this contest a mild travesty may possibly be furnished in a French "Strife of the Flowers". The violet is the Bonapartist badge, and when, last spring, the emperor died in exile, and his partisans sought to show some outward token of their fidelity to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... confidence, based upon long experience in the purchase of poultry, asserted that the real value of the hen was 200 cash, and that not a single cash more of the foreign gentleman's money could they conscientiously invest in such a travesty of a hen as that. But little by little each party gave way till they were ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... is no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were, with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents the honest drawing of his well-known features, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... drowned in grief. The comedy is in a lighter and happier vein; its situations may be trying but they end happily; the sun shines and the air is clear; if storms appear they are the showers of a summer day, not awful tempests. The comedy descends through various forms to the travesty and farce whose purpose is solely to excite laughter by ludicrous scenes and absurd incidents. The melodrama abounds in thrilling situations and extravagant efforts to excite emotions, but its final outcome is a happy one, and the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... 17 in the British diplomatic dispatches is a staggering travesty. So far as I can see it bears no relation to the original. Further, he not only deplores that a liberal government should have an imperialist Foreign Secretary, but he accuses Sir Edward Grey of sacrificing his country's welfare to the interests of his party and ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... already referred to the God of repressions and denials, and now must speak a little more freely of this travesty on "the Father," as expressed to us in Jesus Christ. Of all the obstacles to the rooting out of fear the lingering belief in such a distortion of Divine Love is to my mind the most ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... vain of her little travesty of English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received by her guardian's circle with incomprehensible coldness. Hurt and humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father. The honest rustic received her with a miserable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... her renowned name to a periodical ceremony already performed there. But it would hardly be a reason for commemorating her extortion of privileges in which the inhabitants of Southam did not share; and it would leave the black lady unexplained. She may, indeed, have been a mere travesty, though the hypothesis would be anything but free from difficulty. Here, again, if we have recourse to the comparison of ceremonies, we may obtain some light. Among the tribes of the Gold Coast of Africa the wives of men who have gone to war make a daily procession through the town. They ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... The Bridge Builder, who was a confoundedly long time over his work, by the way, but ultimately came into his own over his own bridge of kisses, built under a heavy barrage of needless misunderstandings. But Joey's pipsqueak shirker fiance, Hilary, was altogether too foolish a travesty of a man ever to have gained her hand or, having gained it, to have held it against any real male in or out of khaki. The fact is that "BERTHA RUCK" can achieve something better than these meandering methods and this spinelessness of characterisation; and it is distinctly disappointing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... had my hair dressed, ornamented with quantities of little curls, diamonds, and jewelled pins, she had the impertinence to appear at Court wearing a huge wig, a grotesque travesty of my coiffure. I was told of it. I entered the King's apartment without deigning to salute Madame, or ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... the passions; the multiplication of androgyne lodges for this purpose; the dual nature of the Divine Principle; and the cultus of Lucifer as the good God. The most curious feature of the performance is that here again it is from end to end a travesty of Eliphas Levi, slice after slice from his chief writings, combined with interlineal additions, which give them a sense diametrically opposed to that of the great magus. Now, it is impossible that two persons, working independently for the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... History I was writing of this Witchcraft; and though she had, before this, read it over and over, yet now she could not read (I believe) one entire sentence of it; but she made of it the most ridiculous Travesty in the world, with such a patness and excess of fancy, to supply the sense that she put upon it, as I was amazed at. And she particularly told me, That I should quickly come to ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... taken her and this detestable house? Suddenly, seemingly by chance, her eyes fell on the box of drug-store candy from which the cheap red ribbon had been torn, and by some odd association of ideas it suggested and epitomized Lise's Sunday excursion with a mama hideous travesty on the journey of wonders she herself had taken. Had that been heaven, and this of Lise's, hell?... And was. Lise's ambition to be supported in idleness and luxury to be condemned because she had believed her own to be higher? Did not both lead to destruction? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the Donner Party, to which he refers in a footnote, suggested to Bret Harte the opening chapters of "Gabriel Conroy"; but he has followed the sensational accounts circulated by the newspapers, and the survivors find his work a mere travesty of the facts. The narrative, however, does not purport to set forth the truth, ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... for it leaves out the difference in character between the child and the cretin. The latter has none of the curiosity, the seeking for experience, the active interest, the pliant expanding will, the sweet capacity for affection, friendship and love present in the average child. The cretin is a travesty on the human being ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... nay, lost nations, had left their records behind them, only they were buried under ground and out of sight. What a travesty it is on history and civilization, what an impeachment of the glory of these later Christian centuries, that the lands which these old empires crowded with a busy population should now be among the most desolate and inaccessible ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... me that, so far, the occupation has been a travesty of any military operation. No plan; no administration; much confusion; troops immobile and likely to sit for weeks upon the beach. The Balkan States Intelligence Officers are on the spot and grasp the inferences. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... jackass-fool," Miss Stapylton said, crisply, "and a fortune-hunter, and a sot, and a travesty, and a whole heap of other things I haven't, as yet had time to look up in the dictionary. And I think—I think you call yourself an English gentleman? Well, all I have to say is God pity England if her gentlemen are of your stamp! There isn't a costermonger in all Whitechapel ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... that event Graustark will be no larger than one of the good-sized farms in your western country. There will be nothing left for Her Royal Highness to rule save a tract so small that the word principality will be a travesty and a jest. This city and twenty-five miles to the south, a strip about one hundred fifty miles long. Think of it! Twenty-five by one hundred fifty miles, and yet called a principality! Once the ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... and beautiful night hours, when this travesty of an accusation is brought, my client, the Most Worshipful, had wandered into the holy star-lit night, clad in the flowing robes symbolical of his exalted earthly estate, to place a wreath, a beautiful wreath, upon ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... was a child I was so bored with 'Telemachus' that, in order to endure it, I turned it into travesty." ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... amounted to little short of a tragedy. When the trial opened, Judge Pickering did not appear, but representations made by his son showed beyond a doubt that he was and had been for two years of unsound mind. To convict a man of misdemeanors for which he was not morally responsible seemed a travesty on justice. Yet there was no other constitutional device for removing him. Though Pickering never appeared in person, the managers for the House pressed the prosecution; and rather than leave the administration of justice to a demented judge, the Senate pronounced the unhappy ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... Republican senatorial cabal insists that the treaty be Americanized. Suppose that Italy asked that it be Italianized— France that it be Frenchized—Britain that it be Britainized, and so on down the line. The whole thing would result in a perfect travesty. ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... work up round his neck as for his toes to protrude through his boots. He gave one the impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb—the inborn and incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of it and scheming out a portrait in which that ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... he was at once indignantly bidden to be silent. He withdrew to the back of the box to swear his fill. He could not recover his temper. If he had been just he would have given homage to the elegance of the travesty and the tour de force of nature and art, which made it possible for a woman of sixty to appear in a youth's costume and even to seem beautiful in it—at least to kindly eyes. But he hated all tours de force, everything ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Barlow, Bishop of Rochester. They had been brought to London to be schooled into conformity; and as part of the process, the English bishops had been commanded to prepare a series of sermons for their benefit. These were such a travesty on the texts of Scripture they were supposed to expound, that if they had been addressed to the ministers' own congregations in Scotland, the humblest of their hearers would have resented them. Whatever these bishops could do, they certainly could not preach. They belonged to that section of the ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... the rear of Harper's Magazine was stored in the warehouse of a certain safety-deposit company, in the winter of 1892. The event which had then vacated the chair is still so near as to be full of a pathos tenderly personal to all readers of that magazine, and may not be lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by one who was thought of for the empty place. He, before putting on the mask and mimic editorial robes—for it was never the real editor who sat in the Easy Chair, except for that brief hour when he took it to pay his deep-thought ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... known. "In what he leaves unsaid," wrote Schiller, "I discover the master of style." It depends, no doubt, upon the vision of the "inward eye," and the reproductive power of the idealising mind, whether the result is a travesty of Nature, or the embodiment of a truth higher than Nature yields. On the other hand, it is equally certain that the identification of localities casts a sudden light in many instances upon obscure passages in a poem, and is by far the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... the corner of the street opposite the site of the old Saint Mary's Cathedral, a street where once had been that row of small and evil cottages where French women, painted, scantily dressed in a travesty of the evening gown, called to the passer-by through the slats of old-fashioned green shutters. That had been before Ruyler's day, but he knew the history of the neighborhood, and this man's interest ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Hamlet, had been succeeded in the rle by Lassalle, whose fine art in newer works had met with full recognition from press and public. To Lassalle's great surprise, his Hamlet, a remarkably fine performance within the limit set by the pitiable operatic travesty of Shakespeare's play, was received coldly, and there was wide comment on the circumstance that he had ignored traditions of performance, especially in the scene between the Prince and his mother. In considerable distress he went to Faure, who ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Walton alludes to his friendship with a much younger and gayer man than himself, Charles Cotton (born 1630), the friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir John Suckling: the translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of Montaigne's Essays. Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in debt, but he was a Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship between him and Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man and to the kindness of the younger, who, to be sure, ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... style was peculiar,—almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. It was a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and do not republics forget? Is fame a travesty, and the judgment of mankind a farce? America had a parallel case in Captain Nathan Hale. Of the same age as Andre, he, after graduation at Yale College with high honors, enlisted in the patriot cause at the beginning of the contest, and secured the love ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... never suffered before. George Ramsey was her first love; the others had been merely childish playthings. She was strangling love, and that is a desperate deed, and the strangler suffers more than love. Maria, with the memory of that marriage which was, indeed, no marriage, but the absurd travesty of one, upon her, was in almost a suicidal frame of mind. She knew perfectly well that if it had not been for that marriage secret which she held always in mind, that George Ramsey would continue to call, that they would become engaged, that her life might be like other women's. And now he was ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... This is no travesty. It is a hasty, but I believe a pretty exact application of Jefferies' method. And I ask how it would look in a book. If the critics really enjoy, as they profess to, all this trivial country lore, why on earth don't they come into the fresh air and find it out for themselves? There ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Either, that is, he remains grave when others laugh, or he laughs, as Horace says, "with alien jaws," by constraint rather than because he cannot help it. He has a confused idea that it is expected of him. Such laughter is apparently the outcome of an uneasy sense of duty, a dismal travesty of the real thing.... ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... us in a change of role," she cried. "I should play the poorest travesty of Mentor to your ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... in a patisserie in the Rue de la Paroisse that we noticed an uninviting compound labelled "Pudding Anglais, 2 fr. 1/2 kilo." A little thought led us to recognise in this amalgamation a travesty of our old friend plum-pudding; but so revolting was its dark, bilious-looking exterior that we felt its claim to be accounted a compatriot almost insulting. And it was with secret gratification that towards the close of January we saw the same stolid, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... of presenting the narrative, and Henry chose the second. He made it a travesty: and all the time that he was talking, Anna continued to gaze at him in that same curious, thoughtful fashion, as if she were noting, for the first time, a subtle variation in ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... all! From the birth-robe to the pall, In this travesty of life, Hollow calm and fruitless strife, Whatsoe'er the actors seem, They are posturing in a dream; Fates may rise, and fates may fall, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... required, you would say, but a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking, and count it the most ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pitilessly, "that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen hours a day in a couple of small rooms—dens. Now there's Sim Burns! what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight. He works like a fiend,—so does his wife,—and what is their reward? Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A dreary present and a well-nigh ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "But I don't admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the minds of all witnesses ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... compassed the death of the infant prince by charms and incantations. Two of the Fujiwara nobles were appointed to investigate the accusation, and they condemned the prince to die by his own hand. He committed suicide, and his wife and children died with him. The travesty of justice was carefully acted throughout. A proclamation was issued promising capital punishment to any one, of whatever rank or position, who compassed the death or injury of another by spells or ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Hamilton. Hardly any Frenchman could have borne to put even a fictitious eidolon of himself in such a contemptible light; very few Englishmen, though they might easily have done this, would have done it so neatly, and with so quaint a travesty of romantic situation. But the main story, as admitted above, is assommant, though, just before the breach, a substitution of three agreeable damsels for the nymph herself ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... book is less a picture of the king's highway than the law's royal road to the gallows,—a satire on the short cut established between the House of Correction and the Condemned Cell. A second and a lighter object in the novel of "Paul Clifford" (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sellingworth. To be with him was like being with eternal youth, and made her long for her own lost youth with an ache of desperation. But to act being young is hideously different from being actually young. She acted astonishingly well, but she paid for every moment of the travesty, and Rupert never noticed, never had the least suspicion of all she was going through ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... the mission of Christ teaches us about the love of God is that it is a love which takes note of and overcomes man's sin. I have said, as plainly as I can, that I reject the travesty of Christianity which implies that it was Christ's mission which originated God's love to men. But a love that does not in the slightest degree care whether its object is good or bad—what sort of a love do you call that? What do ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... it is with a manifest consciousness of the ludicrous that these industrials now do their little drama of the war-dance and the oration and the council-smoke. That drama has degenerated into a very feeble farce now, and the actors in it would be quite outdone in their travesty by any average corps of "supes" at one of our theatres. By-and-by all this will have died out, and the "Indian side" of the stream at Lorette will be assimilated in all its features to the other. The moccason is already typifying the decadence of aboriginal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... waiting; for death, maybe; for home; for health again, or such travesty of health as may come, for the hospital is not an end but a means. It is an interval. It is the connecting link between the trenches and home, between war and peace, ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... She performed the taunting travesty of an elaborate Court curtsey and passed him—a handsome, gleaming vision of satins, laces and glittering jewels—and opening the door with some noise and emphasis, she turned her head gracefully over her shoulder. Unkind laughter still lit up her ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... furniture. Suicides, murderers, and spirits of murdered people, are all apt to haunt houses. The sprites occasionally appear in their proper form, but just as often in disguise: a demon, too, can appear in human shape if so disposed: demons being of their nature deceitful and fond of travesty, as Porphyry teaches us and as Law (1680) illustrates. Whether the spirits of the dead quite know what they are about when they take to haunting, is, in the opinion of Thyraeus, a difficult question. Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... a pitiful travesty of a smile in acknowledgment, and her friends pressed her hand, mercifully refraining from speech. When it came to parting from Margot, however, that was a different matter. Mrs Macalister stooped from the seat of the trap to kiss the ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers: and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously fulfilling the will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself. A frantic travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects. Between the dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the inauguration of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua's birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth century from ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... is rarely hanged for infanticide, and it is a mere travesty of justice to pass on her the death sentence, well knowing that it will never ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the figure of Karl to that of his brother, one is struck at once with the artificiality of the portrait. We seem to have before us in Franz Moor the result of a deliberate effort to conceive the vilest possible travesty of human nature. Nothing here that was copied from nature, nothing that Schiller found in his own heart. It is all a brain-spun creation, born of his dramatic reading and of his studies in medicine and philosophy. In the first place we can observe that Franz is studiously contrasted ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
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