"Drollery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "I'll go, of course," he said as if in a dream. "Of course I'll go at once, but—why—if Miss Flora already—?" Then suddenly he recovered himself in the way Anna knew so well. "Miss Anna"—he gestured with his cap, his eyes kindling with a strange mixture of worship and drollery though his brow ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... not yet complete. His legs were encased in Hessian boots; his shooting-jacket was somewhat the worse for wear; and his hat, which had been eminently respectable at first starting, had acquired a sort of brigandish air; and to add to the drollery of his general appearance, the excellent little Servian horse he rode was not high enough for a man ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... There is a natural gravity and a sonorous stateliness about Spanish, be it ever so colloquial, that make an absurdity doubly absurd, and give plausibility to the most preposterous statement. This is what makes Sancho Panza's drollery the despair of the conscientious translator. Sancho's curt comments can never fall flat, but they lose half their flavour when transferred from their native Castilian into any other medium. But if foreigners have failed to do justice to the humour of Cervantes, they are ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... head to foot in leaves and looked like walking bushes. In this costume they crept from one visitor to another. Such a boy covered with leaves and his head adorned with twigs is called a "Pfingstkonig" [Whitsuntide-King]. This drollery is customary ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... to breakfast, but it was evident, notwithstanding the boasting of Mr. Peter Magnus, that he laboured under a very considerable degree of nervousness, of which loss of appetite, a propensity to upset the tea-things, a spectral attempt at drollery, and an irresistible inclination to look at the clock, every other second, were among the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... phlegm had long been an object of ridicule to the mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very tardiness and prolixity of the story are skilfully made to heighten the humorous effect. The next few years were unproductive. Upon the death of his father, Irving had become a sleeping ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... better than fanaticism under his nose," became the recipient of one of the most amusing and yet most virulent attacks which even that controversial age produced. "The whole pamphlet," Mr. Collins truly says, "is inimitable. Its irony, its humour, its drollery, are delicious." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... appeared a series of really familiar epistles, either remonstrating with or speaking of the "Gineral," or, as the Major latterly styled the President, "the Govermint;" no less admirable for the political acumen they display than for a caustic drollery, which is enforced with shrewd Yankee humour, and in the singular phraseology current amongst 'Uncle Sam's' kindred. These letters have been collected, and are published both in America and in England; and although neither the purity of the politics or the dialect of the honest Major can ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... meanwhile give us the cellar key, and Torrance shall draw us a bottle of your father's wine in honour of the event." Then, turning to me and taking me by the hand, "Mr. David," says he, "I wish you all joy in your good fortune, which I believe to be deserved." And then to Alan, with a spice of drollery, "Mr. Thomson, I pay you my compliment; it was most artfully conducted; but in one point you somewhat outran my comprehension. Do I understand your name to be James? or Charles? or ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... system of the Ancien regime upon the grateful remembrance of the world. A scheme of taxation which exacted posting-charges from a traveller who proposed to continue his journey by water, possesses a natural ingredient of drollery infused into its mere vexatiousness; but a whole volume of satire could hardly put its essential absurdity in a stronger light than is thrown upon it in the short conversation between the astonished Tristram and the officer of the fisc, who had just handed him ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... 'fore he c'n pull up." They all laughed except Miss Verjoos, whose gravity was unbroken, save that behind the dusky windows of her eyes, as she looked at John, there was for an instant a gleam of mischievous drollery. ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... From voluminous letters, it is evident that he was in high spirits and in pleasant company. He was a thorough boy among boys—Matson, Willoughby, Tom Dale and the rest. He joined in their pranks, and contributed to their amusement with his ready good-humour and unflagging drollery. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... were twenty in that gorge, and when I saw him walking away to the wrong one, I thought I should burst out laughing on the spot. That, I am glad to say, I did not do; but calmly going on with my work, I had the new cover in presently and was ready to make a start. From that moment the drollery of the situation—for it was droll, as I live—began in dead earnest, and lasted right through a hot summer's day—until dusk came down, in fact, and the issue was over for good ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... the Green Mountain lad, a broad smile playing over his fine face, as he regarded the drollery of his new acquaintance. "I shall need many suggestions, no doubt, for I feel almost lost in this great city. I had no idea it was so large. I was never here before, and do not know where to go for a ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... Edition of the "Poems", p. 27), was also prefaced by a short letter to the editor of the "Morning Chronicle". Among Coleridge's letters are several of this sort, and each affords a glimpse into his character. Those with the "Raven" and "Talleyrand to Lord Grenville" are characteristic specimens of his drollery and irony. ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of us dug hurriedly into a great heap of earth at the other end of the shelter. We quickly uncovered Walter, a lad who had kept us laughing at his drollery on many a rainy night. The earth had been heaped loosely on him and he was ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... author's having sometimes admitted it in his diction only; which as it is the dress of poetry, doth like the dress of men establish characters, (the one of the whole poem, and the other of the whole man), in vulgar opinion, beyond any of their greater excellences: but surely, a certain drollery in style, where characters and sentiments are perfectly natural, no more constitutes the burlesque, than an empty pomp and dignity of words, where everything else is mean and low, can entitle any performance to the appellation ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... another, he appeared as a hospital "out-patient," wearing a hideous mask (designed by himself) representing some dreadful disease, from which the bystanders recoiled in horror and amazement. With all this drollery Lane kept himself well out of mischief, and was moreover, in days when young and old were more or less inclined to be ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... trinki. Drink (to excess) drinki. Drink trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. Drove (cattle) bestaro, brutaro. Drown droni. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Was there not plenty of the unquenchable fire in the mouth of the drunkard, and in the eyes of the brawler? And could you not perceive something of the infernal cold in the lovingness of the spendthrift, and in your own civility to your customers, whilst any thing remained with them—in the drollery of the buffoons, in the praise of the envious and the backbiter, in the promises of the wanton, or in the shanks of the good companions freezing beneath your tables? Art thou unacquainted with Hell, when the house thou didst keep was Hell? ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... poems called "Leda." There is no more brilliant young poet writing to-day; his title poem is nothing less than extraordinary in pagan and pictorial beauty, but as a whole the cynical and scoffish tone of carnal drollery which gives the book its appeal to the humorously inclined makes a very dubious sandal for a poet planning a long-distance run. Please note that we are not taking sides in any argument: we ourself admire Mr. Huxley's poems enormously; ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... his drollery of style, Bewildered with that sorrowful serenity of smile— The eye's elusive twinkle, and the twitching of the lid, Like he didn't go to say it and was sorry that he did. O Artemus of Michigan! so worthy of the name, Our manager indorses it, and Bill ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... was made, but everybody burst out laughing, sense of drollery overcoming prudence, for it was well known that the she-captain was Madame de Maintenon, and the she-lieutenant Madame des Ursins. The health was drunk, although the words were not repeated, and the scandal ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... endeavored, by serious advice and admonition, to bring him to a proper sense of his dreadful situation, he grinned, made faces at him, tried to tickle him, and played a thousand other pranks with such astonishing drollery, that the gravest countenances became cheerful, and the saddest hearts glad. The soldiers who attended at the gallows were so delighted with his merriment, which they deemed magnanimity, that the sheriffs began to apprehend a rescue, and ordered the hangman instantly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... the story of "The House" do we find his humor so gently turned, so deftly put, and so ripe for the purpose of literary expression. It lies deep here, and those who desire to enjoy it as it should be enjoyed must place their ears close to the heart of human nature. The wit and the rollicking drollery that were but the surface indications of Mr. Field's genius have here given place to the ripe humor that lies as close to tears as to laughter—the humor that is a part and a large part of almost every piece of English literature that has outlived ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... nearly half an hour her lovely face maintained its expression of pathetic and unconquerable woe; but Willett had seated himself at the piano, and he and Sanders and Tommy Dot began singing with inimitable drollery some of the popular melodies of the day, and presently, "to save her life," as she declared, Almira could not resist joining in the laughter and applause, and then Willett began telling of the new step they were dancing in the East,—he had been home just long enough to attend a few parties,—and ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... possible exercise of man's inventive faculties, and are named, not too subtly, the Armstrong gate. This, indeed, is the American beauty of ranch humour, a flower of imperishable fragrance handed to the visitor—who does the lifting with guarded drollery or triumphant snicker, as may be. Buck Devine or Sandy Sawtelle will achieve the mot with an aloof austerity that abates no jot unto the hundredth repetition; while Lew Wee, Chinese cook of the Arrowhead, fails not to brighten it with a nervous giggle, impairing its ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... boy, we are not they Who only go to damn a play, And cackle in the pit; Like good Sir William Curtis{2} we Can laugh at nous and drollery, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... x. of the Vienna edition of Schiller are some ludicrous verses, almost his sole attempt in the way of drollery, bearing a title equivalent to this: 'To the Right Honourable the Board of Washers, the most humble Memorial of a downcast Tragic Poet, at Loeschwitz;' of which Doering gives the following account. 'The first part of Don Carlos ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her attitudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared everything, mocked, caressed, beginning with a pout and ending with some drollery, and challenged passion by exasperating it with refusals and mockery that ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... 'Twelfth Night,' also gave him some hints. Trifling and irritating conceits abound in the 'Two Gentlemen,' but passages of high poetic spirit are not wanting, and the speeches of the clowns, Launce and Speed—the precursors of a long line of whimsical serving-men—overflow with farcical drollery. The 'Two Gentlemen' was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime; it first appeared in the folio of 1623, after having, in all probability, undergone ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... in what is called 'the world' that I'm afraid I'm very ready to take drollery for a serious ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... white-waistcoated stomach, are fearfully suggestive of some recent deed of blood. The pleasant geniality of the countenance is, however, reassuring. Nor—except a decided squint, by which the artist had ambitiously attempted to convey a humoristic drollery to the expression—is there anything sinister ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... story with keen appreciation and rare touches of Irish wit and drollery that made it most interesting as well as very funny. It was a first attempt at descriptive narration. With an inborn gift for striking the vital point, a naturalist's dawning enthusiasm for the wonders of the Limberlost, and the welling joy of his newly ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... with great interest to be shown the hawthorn bush where Emlyn had been found. For Stead and Ben were alike in feeling the bright, merry, capricious, laughing, teasing Emlyn the charm and delight of home. In trouble, or for real aid, they went to Patience, but who was like Emlyn for drollery and diversion? Who ever made Stead laugh as she could, or who so played with Ben, and never, like Rusha, tried to ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the next day that one of the hits of the performance was made by Newgag "in an odd part which he had conceived in a strikingly original way, and impersonated with wonderful finish and subtle drollery." ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... an orchard, and seeing a branch of a fig-tree loaded with delicious fruit, he laid hold of it, but the ass went on, leaving him suspended. Just then the gardener came up, and asked him what he did there. The man replied, "I fell off the ass."—An analogue to this drollery is found in an Indian story-book, entitled Katha Manjari: One day a thief climbed up a cocoa-nut tree in a garden to steal the fruit. The gardener heard the noise, and while he was running from his house, giving the alarm, the thief hastily descended from the tree. "Why were you up that tree?" ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... world, serves but to admit additional vexations. Every few moments the steps of the passengers are heard to pause, and some well-known face appears in the free sunshine behind the iron bars, brimful of mirth and drollery, the owner whereof stands on tiptoe to tickle poor Dr. Bullivant with a stinging sarcasm. Then laugh the little boys around the prison door, and the wag goes chuckling away. The apothecary would fain retaliate, but all his quips and repartees, ...
— Dr. Bullivant - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... delicious drollery seem to have had Dr. Erasmus Darwin only in view, they could not, we thus see, parody his peculiar crotchets without hitting off not less neatly some of the corresponding extravagances of both earlier and later expounders ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... him! blind and dumb, Deaf and dumb, Twirl the carle so troublesome! Kinsman, once so full of glee, Kinsman, where's thy drollery, Where thy tricks, thou cunning one? All thy tricks are spent and past, To the devil gone at last Like a silly fop thou'lt prate, Like a washerwoman rate. Thou art but a simpleton. Now thou mayest—more ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... functions, armed with a bamboo-cane, driving his herd to the spiritual pasture. He seemed himself to be conscious of the burlesque attaching to his office,—at least he behaved very absurdly in it, and many a stroke fell rather in jest than in earnest. The drollery of the driver did not, however, enliven the dejected countenances of ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... fireworks were equally successful whether they blazed splendidly or fizzled ingloriously. It was enough for the boys that Troy Gilbert was doing the act; they whooped at every figure, and whooped again at Troy's unaccustomed drollery. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... lucid ingenious talk and logic, in all manner of brilliant utterance and tongue-fence, I have hardly known his fellow. So ready lay his store of knowledge round him, so perfect was his ready utterance of the same,—in coruscating wit, in jocund drollery, in compact articulated clearness or high poignant emphasis, as the case required,—he was a match for any man in argument before a crowd of men. One of the most supple-wristed, dexterous, graceful and successful fencers in that kind. A ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... grew stronger and sturdier he evinced much curiosity, playfulness and drollery, and to these characteristics would have to be added, when he became partly grown, a kind of bear sense of humor which was ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... not the rough power and drollery of Plautus; his whole attraction lies in the subtlety of his amorous intrigues. Steele, speaking of one of the plays, "The Self-Tormentor," observes, "It is from the beginning to the end a perfect picture of human life, but I did not observe in the whole one ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... and inspiring music, had long maintained a noxious popularity among the peasantry. Of Burns' immediate contemporaries, the more conspicuous were, John Skinner, Hector Macneill, John Mayne, and Richard Gall. Grave as a pastor, Skinner revelled in drollery as a versifier; Macneill loved sweetness and simplicity; Mayne, with a perception of the ludicrous, was plaintive and sentimental; Gall ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... necessarily make in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent gayety of heart and national drollery and wit, the poor Irish emigrant has sad thoughts of the "ould mother of him," sitting lonely in her solitary cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father's blessing and a sister's farewell are haunting ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... naturally fell upon her little feet, which were sailing about in the Dominie's slippers! Amid the general laughter, she walked up to the diffident youth, who could scarcely believe his eyes, and said with an air of irresistible drollery, by which she tried to cover her confusion: 'Here is your Christmas present, sir; do you hold to your promise of accepting it?' Of course, the lady having broken the ice, the Dominie could do no less than speak out, and, all being willing, the two were soon converted into one; a good ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... has qualities necessary to fill up the harmony of life. As a general thing, the Irish servants are perhaps more honest, and dull as they seem, have more head; but the negro has more heart. His nature is irrepressible and joyous; he is full of comicality and drollery, of fun, jeers, jokes, yah-yas, and merriment; and this element will be needed in our midst to temper our puritan and national seriousness. He loves music whether sad, burlesque, or gay; is devoted to those who treat him worthily, his affections being easily won; and there is something touching, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Father O'Leary was simple. In his countenance there was a mixture of goodness, solemnity, and drollery, which fixed every eye that beheld it. No one was more generally loved or revered; no one less assuming or more pleasing in his manner. Seeing his external simplicity, persons with whom he was arguing were sometimes tempted to treat him cavalierly; ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... hand of time which turns the kaleidoscope of human affairs appeared to move slowly for a few weeks, as far as the characters of my story are concerned. The two little bakers worked together daily, one abounding in mirth and drollery, and the other cheered, or rather beguiled from melancholy in spite of herself. Business grew apace, not only because two girls who evoked general sympathy were the principals of the firm, but also for the reason that they put something of their own dainty natures into their wares. Aun' ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... was the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700. He was not old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers. The "sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the drollery of its expressions. A specimen or two may dispose the reader to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of mind. "If unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak." Some of his ministerial associates ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Collections of Letters of State, and a little book, Delices de Hollande, with another little book or two, all of good use or serious pleasure: and Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies. My mind being thus settled, I went by linke home, and so to my office, and to read in Rushworth; and so home to supper and to bed. Calling at Wotton's, my ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the Bandit, who appeared but in the last scene, and even then uttered not a word, was the once great actor on that itinerant Thespian stage, known through many a fair for his exuberant humour, his impromptu jokes, his arch eye, his redundant life of drollery, and the strange pathos or dignity with which he could suddenly exalt a jester's part, and call forth tears in the startled hush of laughter; he whom the Cobbler had rightly said, "might have made a fortune at Covent Garden." There was the remnant of the old popular mime!—all ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... order. Mrs. Hopper was not a resident domestic; she came at stated hours. Obviously a widow, she had a poor, loose-hung, trailing little body, which no nourishment could plump or fortify. Her visage was habitually doleful, but contracted itself at moments into a grin of quaint drollery, which betrayed her for ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... practice of contributing verses to the local prints. In 1846, he published a duodecimo volume, entitled, "Poems, Humorous and Sentimental." His poetical characteristics are simplicity and pathos, combined with considerable power of satirical drollery. Delighting in music, and fond of society, he was occasionally led to indulge in excesses, of which, at other times, he was heartily ashamed, and which he has feelingly lamented in some of his poems. Few Scottish poets have ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... long, and tied back from her face with a plain black ribbon. Her face was singularly intelligent, her voice clear and quick, her eyes often much too mournful for the eyes of a child, but sometimes flashing with fun, as, for instance, when Mark engaged her in some piece of drollery. Then the old spirit that she used to display when she performed her little mimicries for Mrs. Rushton's amusement would spring up in her again, and she would take great delight in seeing Mark roll ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... grand to-night," whispered a thin man, who looked like a tailor, seated on the other side of Leonard. Time flies,—an hour. Look again at the Dutch clock. John Burley is grand, he is in his zenith, at his culminating point. What magnificent drollery! what luxuriant humour! How the Rabelais shakes in his easy-chair! Under the rush and the roar of this fun (what word else shall describe it?) the man's intellect is as clear as gold sand under a river. Such wit and such truth, and, at times, such a flood of quick ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... One other flash broke from him in this retirement. His novel, called the Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which he sent to England to be printed in 1770, though abounding in portraitures of exquisite drollery, and in situations highly comical, has not the full zest and flavour of his earlier works. The story does not move on with the same impetuosity. The characters have more the appearance of being broad caricatures from real ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... conception and the execution the boy happened to light upon a copy of the Rolliad. If such was the case, he already had too fine a sense of humour to have persevered in his original plan after reading that masterpiece of drollery. It is worthy of note that the voluminous writings of his childhood, dashed off at headlong speed in the odds and ends of leisure from school-study and nursery routine, are not only perfectly correct in spelling and grammar, but ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... reason or other no photographs being permitted. Here the spirit of the Renaissance has had full play, and you find comedy mixed with pathos, practical good sense with Biblical solemnity, quaintness, beauty, grace, drollery, all in one. The middle statues in bold relief are those of the early Kings of France and the Abbots of St. Claude, besides many noteworthy saints and martyrs, among these St. Denis with his head in ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... drollery of these madcaps to the attentions of our courtiers?" said Francis, more gently. "Certes are ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... attain to the highest state of enjoyment, and be shortly admitted to fraternity with the gods,"—the exploits of Hoonamunta, the Divine Monkey, are gravely related, with a dramatic force and figurativeness that hold a street audience spell-bound; but to the European imagination the childish drollery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... been long landed, before about twenty of them, men and boys, joined us, without expressing the least sign of fear or distrust. There was one of this company conspicuously deformed, and who was not more distinguishable by the hump upon his back, than by the drollery of his gestures, and the seeming humour of his speeches, which he was very fond of exhibiting, as we supposed, for our entertainment. But, unfortunately, we could not understand him; the language spoken here being wholly unintelligible to us. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... she had left her heart in my keeping. But the foolishness of this separation struck me with a force that had been lacking until now, and for a time I felt toward the old man a hardness that not even a keen appreciation of his kindness and his drollery could soften. Gradually, however, the truth came to me that Alf had drawn the plan, and with my arms stretched out toward the hill-top that had slowly arisen between me and the fluttering handkerchief I foolishly apologized ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... little man, with the air of an arrant old bachelor. His nose was shaped like the bill of a parrot; his face slightly pitted with the small-pox, with a dry perpetual bloom on it, like a frost-bitten leaf in autumn. He had an eye of great quickness and vivacity, with a drollery and lurking waggery of expression that was irresistible. He was evidently the wit of the family, dealing very much in sly jokes and innuendoes with the ladies, and making infinite merriment by harpings ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so became a literary product of a rarer and stranger ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wonderful woman,' said Mrs. Edmonstone, in her quiet way; and Guy with an expression between drollery and simplicity, said, 'Then there aren't many ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... intruder. Finding no one there but the audience, she then searches the gallery fruitlessly, and getting a sudden inspiration, she looks behind her, and, to her immense astonishment, finds her lover standing within a foot of her." This, as told with Levasseur's inimitable drollery, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... that could prevail against the influence of 'Mr. Dooley's' ebullient drollery, gay wisdom, and rich brogue would be profound indeed, and its victim would be an altogether hopeless case."—The ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... 'Little Prudy.' Compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature; she alone is the real thing. All the quaintness of children, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, is infinite uncommon drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the naturalness of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its progress, all these united for dear Little Prudy to embody ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... nor encouragement. Indeed, their methods and ingenuity in evading rules and regulations and defying discipline were as original as they were persevering, and could the third-story room of the building occupied by the subject of this sketch be given tongue, it would tell a tale of frolic and drollery that would only find parallel in the inimitable pages of Marryatt. Convenient apparatus for the stewing or roasting of oysters, poaching of eggs, or the mixing of refreshing drinks, could be readily stowed away from the inspecting officer, or a roast goose or turkey ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... Mr. Shortreed, his companion in all these Liddesdale raids, "sic an endless fund of humour and drollery as he had then wi' him. Never ten yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsel' to everybody! He aye did as the lave did; never made himsel' the great man or took ony airs in the company. I've seen him in a' moods in these jaunts, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... say, the various scenes of the journey to Hades, the crossing of Acheron, the Frogs' choric songs, and the trial before Pluto, afford opportunities for much excellent fooling in our Author's very finest vein of drollery, and "seem to have supplied the original idea for those modern burlesques upon the Olympian and Tartarian deities which were at ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... naturally, sire. I was out driving in a plain cabriolet, when I remarked the boy, who was singing, and otherwise exercising his animal spirits by hopping, dancing, and running along the road by the side of the vehicle. I was much diverted by his drollery, and finally invited him to take a drive with me. He jumped in—without awaiting a second invitation, stared wonderfully at me with his great brown eyes, and in high satisfaction kicked his feet against the dash-board, and watched the motion of the wheels. Now and then he vented his delight by a ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... France—the Burns of Limousin, Provence, and Languedoc. His songs are in the mouths of all who sing in the fields and by the cottage firesides. Their subjects are always rural, naive, and full of rustic pathos and rustic drollery. To use his words to me, he sings what the hearts of the people say, and he can no more help it than can the birds in the trees. Translations into French of his main poems have appeared; and compositions more full of natural and thoroughly ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... least of those recorded by the first missionaries, on the Lower St. Lawrence, is still current among the tribes of the Upper Lakes. Many of them are curious combinations of beliefs seriously entertained with strokes intended for humor and drollery, which never fail to awaken peals of laughter in the lodge-circle. Giants, dwarfs, cannibals, spirits, beasts, birds, and anomalous monsters, transformations, tricks, and sorcery, form the staple of the story. Some of the Iroquois ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... the frost, was glowing like crimson, while the broad beaver hat that overshadowed it, and the feathers with which the beaver was edged, were incrusted with the snow that was rapidly forming a pyramid on its crown, imparting to his whole aspect a drollery at which I could have laughed heartily, had not his well-known acuteness and ferocity awed me into a becoming gravity of demeanor; and delivering my dispatch with a tolerably good grace, I reined back my horse to await any reply he might be pleased ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... country party," said the King. "I am much minded to secure the lad for an elfin page," he added aside to Killigrew. "There's a fund of excellent humour and drollery in those queer eyes of his! So, Sir Hobgoblin, if you are proof against cold steel, I know not what is to be done with you. Get you back, and devise some other mode of finding your way ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brother of the nature of her quarrel with Mrs. Houghton, only that, even to a brother, she would not have mentioned her husband's folly. When he spoke of her crying, or laughing, or sneezing, she liked the little attempt at drollery. She liked to know that he had found her charming. Where is the woman who does not wish to charm, and is not proud to think that she has succeeded with those whom she most likes? She could not rebuke him. She could not even avoid letting him see ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of Seraphim and just men made ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ventured to ask His Highness for his autograph. The Prince, who has perhaps a more exquisite sense of humour than any other sovereign of Europe, declared with a laugh that he had no pen. Still roaring over this inimitable drollery, we begged the Prince to honour us by ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... the illiberality of my heart, I could not but regard as strikingly characteristic of the character of the people to whom we were now opposed, and which, as at the time it had something in it truly comical, I cannot resist the inclination of repeating, though aware that its title to drollery must in a great measure be lost in the relation. Having been informed that in a certain part of the forest a company of riflemen had passed the night, I took with me a party of soldiers, and proceeded ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... cooked with any fine, savory herbs, such as Drollery, which is always in season, or Pleasant Reminiscence, which no one need be without, as it keeps ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Picket, Spy, Scout, Bivouac and Siege, with feats of Daring, Bold and Brilliant Marches, Remarkable Cases of Sharp-Shooting, Hand-to-Hand Encounters, Startling Surprises, Ingenious Strategy, Celebrated Tactics, Wonderful Escapes, Comical and Ludicrous Adventures on Land and Sea; Wit, Drollery and Repartee, Famous Words and Deeds of Women, Sanitary and Hospital Scenes, Prison Experiences, Partings and Re-unions, Last Words of the Dying, with affecting illustrations of the home affections and mementoes of the tender passion; final scenes and events in the great Drama, and all those ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... him I also presented some article or other. There were great numbers of children and, as I took notice of the little ones that were in arms and gave them beads, both small and great, but with much drollery and good humour, endeavoured to benefit by the occasion. Boys of ten and twelve years old were caught up in arms and brought to me, which created much laughter; so that in a short time I got rid of all I had ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... to his age and to his infirmities of body and temper. While she was away the world in general, and his own little sphere in particular, tended toward a hopeless snarl. Jinny, the colored servant, was subserviency itself, but her very obsequiousness irritated him, although her drollery was at times diverting. It was usually true, however, that but one touch and one voice could soothe the jangling nerves. As Graham saw this womanly magic, which apparently cost no more effort than the wood fire put forth in banishing chilliness and discomfort, the ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... for men to hurl their darts at, and one cannot help feeling that a good deal of the fun got its point from the knowledge that the charges were exaggerated or untrue. You find the Jewish satirists exhausting all their stores of drollery on the subject of rollicking drunkenness. They roar till their sides creak over the humor of the wine-bibber. They laugh at him and with him. They turn again and again to the subject, which shares the empire with women in the Jewish poets. Yet we know well enough that the writers ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... Grotian Religion. Dr. Parker likewise preached up the doctrine of Non-resistance, which slavish principle is admirably calculated to prepare the people for receiving any yoke. Marvel, whose talent consisted in drollery, more than in serious reasoning, took his own method of exposing those opinions. He wrote a piece called The Rehearsal Transposed, in which he very successfully ridiculed Dr. Parker. This ludicrous essay met with several answers, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... worthies, making him laugh heartily at their sayings passed into tradition and fable among us boys; for our one-eyed shoemaker and our corpulent grocer, like many other country wits to fortune and to fame unknown, surpassed either Douglas Jerrold or Sydney Smith in quip and drollery. And I did not omit George Lenox, for all Belfield except his wife was in the secret of his affairs, and they were our crowning joke, in which poor George himself joined merrily, although the story was so ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... from the French, by Sydney, on Arab customs, and all Lord Fordham had been able to collect about Hippo, also "The Single Eye," by Allen, and "Marco's Felucca," by Armine and Babie in partnership, and a fair proportion of drollery. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Christmas Eve an immense crowd of men, women, and children throng this street, nearly a mile in length. The vendors shriek at the top of their voice, praising themselves and their goods, and then, with merry peals of laughter, exhibit with Neapolitan drollery all the arts of their trade. The crowd catch the contagious spirit of fun, and toss witticisms to and fro, until the welkin rings with shouts and laughter. A revolution in Paris could not create greater excitement, or greater noise, than the Christmas fair at ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... of the pleasant evening that followed I treasured for many years. I sat beside my mother, my hand clasped in hers, telling her the story of my adventures. Jeanne was full of high spirits, while Felix was simply overflowing with wit and good-humoured drollery. ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. Nothing short of a seismic cataclysm—an earthquake, in fact—could deter a San Francisco audience after that. Mark Twain's farewell address, given ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... strange, and that he was telling the tale of his own disgrace. But when the direct question had been asked him he had been unable to refrain from answering it directly. He had thought of turning it off with some jest or affectation of drollery, but had failed. At the moment he had been unable not ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... the top of the little fellow's head. But in the last year there had come a change, as the little boy's speech and ideas began to grow clearer and cleverer, and now and then, as is the case with all children, some speech of his would delight the listener with its precocity or drollery. The smith led too lonely a life not to welcome the little change that the boy brought him, although he did not admit this, either to himself or to others. He called him oftener to the workshop, tossed him a light hammer to play with, or told ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... one song and only one that I ever heard, and he was always called upon for it at harvest suppers and other jollifications; it was not a classic, but he rendered it with characteristic drollery, and always brought down the house. I conclude my sketch of him by mentioning it because it is almost my last impression of his vivid personality, trotted out with great energy at my farewell supper, a day or two ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... repugnance between the spirit of the man and the stuff of his present undertaking? The idea of a bookworm riding the whirlwind of war! The thing is most like Brutus; but how out of his element, how unsphered from his right place, it shows him! There is a touch of drollery in the contrast, which the richest steeping of poetry does not disguise. And the irony is all the more delectable for being so remote and unpronounced; like one of those choice arrangements in the background of a painting, which, ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... great many, I will venture to say that the advantage they will gain in the subject having been so treated as to be brought within the comprehension and adapted to the tastes of a child, is pretty nearly incalculable. The quaintness and drollery of the illustrations with which difficult scientific facts are set forth will provoke many a smile, no doubt, and in some young people perhaps a tendency to feel themselves treated babyishly; but if in the course ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... then the rolling and tossing of the cargoes and packages on the backs of the animals, and the streaming out of curtains, scarfs, shawls, and loose draperies of every shape and color, lent touches of drollery and bright contrasts to the scene. One instant the spectator on the hill was disposed to laugh, then to admire, then to shiver at the immensity of a danger; over and over again amidst his quick variation of feeling, he repeated the exclamation: "These are not men, but devils fleeing from ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... I never could make anything out of his writings. Coleridge often and repeatedly pressed me to settle him on a salary, and often and repeatedly did I try; but it would not do. Of politics he knew nothing; they were out of his line of reading and thought; and his drollery was vapid, when given in short paragraphs fit for a newspaper; yet he has produced some agreeable books, possessing a tone of humour and kind feeling, in a quaint style, which it is amusing to read, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... not for his cruelty to the men, he is the most amusing liar I ever heard. I am often more inclined to laugh than to be angry at him; he has a vein of wit and rich humour that runs through his composition, and never quits him. There is drollery even in his malice, and, if we cannot get clear of him, we must make the ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... oddity of the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... people have necessarily a great variety: the color and the perfume of life are in them. Listen to the mocking, railing drollery of "There cam' a young man," the sly humor of the "Laird o' Cockpen," or "Hey, Johnnie Cope!" and you may understand one side of Scottish character. The Border ballads, that go lilting along to the galloping of horses and jingling of spurs, are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... that he recovered. Cowper says that Puss showed his gratitude by licking his hand for a long time, a ceremony he never went through with but once in his life, before or afterward. Bess, who died young, was the funny one. He had a great fund of humor and drollery. Tiney, though very entertaining in his way, seems to have been rather a grave and surly fellow. When he died—and he lived to a good old age, some nine years, I think—Cowper buried him with honor, and wrote an epitaph for him. I will copy two or three stanzas from ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable. These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided, the absolute monarch of English literary Bohemia. We hear of a room blazoned about with Jonson's ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... a loss to understand the meaning of his companion, whose waggery and drollery cropped out at such unexpected times that no one knew when to expect it. The Indian was approaching and was already close at hand. Keen-eared, and with their senses always about them, Apaches are likely to detect the slightest disturbance. ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... and morris-dancers having disappeared, another drollery was exhibited, called the "Fool and his Five Sons," the names of the hopeful offspring of the sapient sire being Pickle Herring, Blue Hose, Pepper Hose, Ginger Hose, and Jack Allspice. The humour of ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... you were a man you wou'd not descend to such a jakes." These thoughts not a little disturb'd her; but I was asham'd of nothing more, than that Eumolpus, suspecting the occasion, shou'd in his next verses make our suppos'd quarrel the subject of his drollery; and lest my care to avoid it shou'd prove ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... looked at the charming child, to whom Lord Petherton was talking with evident kindness and gaiety—a conjunction that evidently excited Mitchy's interest. "May WE then know her?" he asked with an effect of drollery. "May ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... an extraordinary drollery of Fortune sent off to you by this day's post a P.C. inviting you to appear in sealskin. But this had reference to the weather, and not at all, as you may have been led to fancy, to our rustic raiment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and smile. First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for the immovable solemnity of their features. Clement promised himself not a little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the venerable Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had cultivated a literary taste which would make him a more agreeable companion than the common ecclesiastics of his grade ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... (Do you remember?) The drollery of the wind on our faces, And horizons reeling, And the terror of the plain Heaving like a gaunt pelvis to the sun... Under us—threshing and twanging Torn-up roots ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... Susan, vexed, though her husband could not help smiling at the arch drollery of the girl's tone and manner, "do not thou learn light mockery of ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and there had grasped a letter, which she still carried; but when Alice said those last cold words, "Pray do not ask me," she released the grasp, and left the letter where it was. "I suppose he won't bite me, at any rate," she said, and she assumed that look of childish drollery which she would sometimes put on, almost with a grimace, but still with so much prettiness that no one who ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... and every time the gust struck the sail he was lifted from his seat by the crowding of the oar and the haul of the rope. His muscles swelled tense and rigid—the sweat poured from his face; but he laughed when Lincoln, with reckless drollery, began to shout ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... Alexander Campbell. Others had listened to John Smith, and had been magnetized by the inimitable wit and wisdom of that marvelous man, and their hearts had drawn heroic courage from his heart. Others still had been captivated by the boyish and unstudied drollery of Walter Scott, only to be swept away by a whirlwind of passionate appeal and terrible invective, or to be melted with the tenderness of his portrayal of the love of Jesus. And all these came to Kansas bearing a great cause in their hearts, and determined to build ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... after he was full grown, and whose death was occasioned by his being turned into his box, which had been washed, while it was yet damp, was a hare of great humour and drollery. Puss was tamed by gentle usage; Tiney was not to be tamed at all; and Bess had a courage and confidence that made him tame from the beginning. I always admitted them into the parlour after supper, where the carpet affording their feet a firm ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... allotted, with the exception of two or three more angels, who peeped or perched behind the main figures with a certain subdued drollery in their faces, as if the thing had gone on long enough, and it was now time to upset something or kick up a row of some sort. We knew these good folk to be saints and angels, because we had been told they were; otherwise we should never have guessed ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... of a strait- waistcoat. If she had not lived by rule (on her showing) she would have lived infallibly by riot. Her rules and her riots, her reservations and her concessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her extravagant practice; her drollery, that mocked at her melancholy; her imagination, that mocked at her drollery; and her wonderful manners, all her own, that mocked a little at everything: these were part of the constant freshness which made those who ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... it won't be a bit of trouble to show ye George Washington's room; or"—with inimitable Irish drollery—"I can tell ye that he dined in this ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... thought I am indebted to that picture—it is my principal source of inspiration; when my imagination flags, as of course it occasionally does, I stare upon those features, and forthwith strange ideas of fun and drollery begin to flow into my mind; these I round, amplify, or combine into goodly creations, and bring forth as I find an opportunity. It is true that I am occasionally tormented by the thought that, by doing this, I ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... account of a certain apish drollery and humor which exhibited itself in the lad, and a liking for some of the old man's pursuits, the first of the twins was the grandfather's favorite and companion, and would laugh and talk out all his infantine heart ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... and reportable sallies of Sydney Smith have been, of course, often repeated, but the fanciful fun and inexhaustible humorous drollery of his conversation among his intimates can never be adequately rendered or reproduced. He bubbled over with mirth, of which his own enjoyment formed an irresistible element, he shook, and his eyes glistened at his own ludicrous ideas, as they dawned ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... bowed low, expressed his delight in the prospect, and kissed the Prioress's hand, but the heavy door was already being opened, and with an expressive look of drollery and resignation, the good lady withdrew her hand, hastily brought her Benedictine hood and veil closely over her face, and rode into the court, followed by her suite. Anne had time to let her hand be kissed by Sir Giles and Hal, who felt as if a world had closed on him as the heavy doors clanged ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... almost seem as if there were a certain drollery of art which leads men who think they are doing one thing to do another and very different one. Thus, men have set up in their painted church-windows the symbolisms of virtues and graces, and the images of saints, and even of Divinity itself. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... arte amandi, and The remedy of love Englished. As also The loves of Hero and leander, amock poem: together with choice poems, and rare pieces of drollery. London, printed in ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... Billy Goat was a popular person at Kowatin, in the Saskatchewan country. He had an inimitable drollery, heightened by a cast in his eye, a very large mouth, and a round, good-humored face; also he had a hand and arm like iron, and was altogether a great man on ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... wake, conspired suddenly to find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too, under another influence, was become an object ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... and flats of the Ohio, they were a class unto themselves—"half horse, half alligator," a contemporary styled them. Rough fellows, much given to fighting, and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse drollery and stinging repartee. The river towns suffered sadly at the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried from thirty to forty boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently traveled in company. After the Indian scare ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... still room for excitement and drollery in the perennial question of the seats. Mr. Chamberlain is not a man to whom people are inclined to make concessions; he is so little inclined to give up anything himself; and, accordingly, there arose a very serious question as to the first seat on the third bench below the Gangway, which ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... the author was present, they could not have more civilly accepted the toast; it was a bold kind of drollery in Mr. Burney, for I was fain to drink my own health in a bumper, which he filled ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... feverishly getting into his ring clothes. These consisted of a loose fitting pair of trousers, a slouch hat and a coat much the worse for wear. A "Rube" act, it was called in show parlance, and it was that in very truth, more because of Teddy's drollery than for the makeup that ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... the onely drinking: and for thy walles a pretty slight Drollery, or the Storie of the Prodigall, or the Germane hunting in Waterworke, is worth a thousand of these Bed-hangings, and these Flybitten Tapistries. Let it be tenne pound (if thou canst.) Come, if it were not for thy humors, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... chief stage carpenter and property-man, and is married to another lady of the company. One of the under-carpenters is stepson of the chief comic who was formerly a fruit seller and is a little fellow of inexhaustible drollery with a flavour of ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Terminus non distinguuntur. The fellows argument was that usual one, quae separantur distinguuntur et haec, etc.; the Lad answered by a distinction, quae separantur per se verum: per accidens, falsum; and so they went on. The lad chanced to transmit a proposition one tyme: the fellow in a drollery replied, si tu transmittas ego—revocabo. Thus have we dwelt enough on Orleans, its hy tyme for ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... each other, and turning up their eyes in drollery began smirking. Then one went up close to Arabella, and, although nobody was near, imparted some information in a low tone, the other observing curiously ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... slight pique that was apparent in the soldier's manner; but, after following the train of her own thoughts in silent enjoyment for a moment longer, she seemed to yield to their drollery, and laughed until her dark eyes flashed with merriment. Cecilia did not assume the severe gravity with which she sometimes endeavored to repress, what she thought, the unseasonable mirth of her cousin; and the wondering Griffith fancied, as he glanced his eye from one to the other, that he could ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and for which Guzman d'Alfarache, Lazarillo de Tormes, or Estevanillo Gonzalez might have sat:—faces that almost make one in love with roguery, they seem so full of vivacity and enjoyment. There was all the knavery, and more than all the drollery of a Spanish picaroon in the laughing eyes of the English apprentice; and, with a little more warmth and sunniness of skin on the side of the latter, the resemblance between them would ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... competent staff. I asked what he thought of Lincoln. "He is a beast." This was all he would say of him. I knew, of course, that he meant bete in the French sense, and not in the offensive English sense of the word. The truth was, that Gurowski had little relish for humor, and the drollery which formed so prominent a part of Lincoln's external character was unintelligible and offensive to him. At a later period, as I judge from his Diary, he understood the President better, and did full ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... only the brave figures of my good master Rabelais, and of Monsieur Descartes, both unknown to the people of the country. To resume: the said Carandas was, on his return from Flanders, entertained by his comrade, and by all those by whom he was liked for his jokes, his drollery, and quaint remarks. The good hunchback appeared cured of his old love, embraced the children, and when he was alone with the dyer's wife, recalled the night in the clothes-chest, and the night in the sewer, to her memory, saying to her, "Ha, ha! ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... acquaintance he had made on the roof. They made signs to each other, and once, when he met him in the street, he took the man to a wineshop, and they drank together, much to the surprise of Olivier, who was a little scandalized. He found the man's drollery and unfailing good-humor very entertaining, but did not curse him any the less, with his troop of workmen and stupid idiots who were raising a barricade in front of the house and robbing him of air and light. Olivier ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... left Dingley Dell, Bob Sawyer, "thrusting his forefinger between two of Mr. Pickwick's ribs and thereby displaying his native drollery and his knowledge of the anatomy of the human frame at one and the same time, enquired—'I say, old boy, where do you hang out?' Mr. Pickwick replied that he was at present suspended at the ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... of drollery always put him in a good humour. He noticed it also tickled the Chinamen, who thought "Misty Zeekee" one of ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... Harwood was admitted to practice in the United States courts midway of his third year in Bassett's office. The doors of the state courts swing inward to any Hoosier citizen of good moral character who wants to practice law,—a drollery of the Hoosier constitution still tolerated. The humor of being a mere "constitutional" lawyer did not appeal to Harwood, who revered the traditions and the great names of his chosen profession, and he had first written his name on the rolls of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson |
