"Ludicrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... odd, or indeed absolutely ludicrous, was the circumstance that, by a species of legerdemain, a whisper had passed among the spectators so stealthily, and yet so soon, that the attorney and his companion were the only two on deck who remained ignorant of the ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... vision of that haunted water in which floated the great Yellow God, and of some mad being casting himself to his death beneath the moon, while his beautiful witch wife who was "hungry for more spirits" sat upon its edge and laughed. Although his language was now commonplace enough, even ludicrous at times, the negro had undoubtedly the art of narration. His auditors felt that he spoke of what he knew, or had seen, that the very recollection of it frightened ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... matter of fact an assegai had gone half through it and hit upon the bone. Although I never felt it at the time, this wound was dealt to me by that great Quabie whom Hans and I had received upon our spears, doubtless as he fell. Hans, by the way, was there also, an awful and yet a ludicrous spectacle, for the Quabie had fallen right on the top of him and lain so with results that may, be imagined. There he sat upon the ground, looking upwards, gasping with his fish-like mouth. Each gasp, I remember, fashioned itself into the word "Allemachte!" that is "Almighty," a favourite ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... gap in the conversation under a blush; and conscious of an ultra-swollen phrase, she snatched at it nervously to correct it: 'They are becoming alive to the necessity for action.' But she was talking to a soldier! 'I mean, their heads are opening.' It sounded ludicrous. 'They are educating themselves differently.' Were they? 'They wish to take their part in the work of the world.' That was nearer the proper tone, though it had a ring of claptrap rhetoric hateful to her: she had read it and shrunk from it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... laughed, and said she must take care of the dog when they got to the town; and Amabel was encouraged to ask if she might take off the Shetland veil. Hesitating between his fear of Amabel's catching cold, and a common-sense conviction that it was ludicrous to dress her according to her invalid mother's susceptibilities, the Squire was relieved from the responsibility of deciding by Amabel's promptly exposing her rosy cheeks to the breeze, and they drove on happily to the town. The Squire had ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... 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
... scene, such as the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, at St. Andrew's, at Antwerp, or the Conversion of St. Norbert, in the cathedral at Malines. Certainly the fallen horseman in the latter, if not a little ludicrous, is a trifle out ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... those who desired a static condition of the affections, Paris was at once the first and last place in which to be friendly with a pretty woman. Revelation was alighting like a bird in his heart, singing: 'Elle est ton reve! Elle est ton reve! Sometimes this seemed natural, sometimes ludicrous—a bad case of elderly rapture. Having once been ostracised by Society, he had never since had any real regard for conventional morality; but the idea of a love which she could never return—and how could she at his age?—hardly mounted beyond ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... by the stream, thinking perhaps that he had reached Canada already. He cleared land, subsisted somehow, and made for himself a considerable farm upon the naturally open intervale. He lived here alone for many years, seen at times by passing lumbermen, or hunters. Some ludicrous stories are told of the fright which the sight of a jet black man gave inexperienced whites who chanced to stumble upon him suddenly and alone in the woods! There were certain ignorant persons ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... whether the spears were held upright or sloped, whether they came down to the charge one after another or all together? To men absolutely unaccustomed to order of any kind, but used only to fight each in the way that suited him best, these details appeared absolutely ludicrous. ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... inquired about his old acquaintances, and Bart answered graphically. He was in a mood of reckless gayety. He took them up, one after another, and in a few happy strokes presented them in ludicrous caricature, irresistible for its hits of humor, and sometimes for wit, and sometimes sarcasm—a stream of sparkle and glitter, with queer quotations of history, poetry, and Scripture, always apt, and the latter not always irreverent. ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... Charles's Court. That this middle-aged buffoon should aspire to the hand of the loveliest and most elusive woman in England was only less amazing than that she should smile on his suit. The Court was struck with consternation—and convulsed with laughter. Nothing so utterly astonishing and so ludicrous had come within its experience. But there could be no doubt about it. La belle Stuart, who had so long resisted the King, and given the cold shoulder to such gallants as the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Arlington, ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... bombarda, or a sparanara. All this time Ghita was thoughtful and silent; quite as much so, indeed, as Tommaso himself, though from a very different motive. Nothwithstanding all the gossip, and the many ludicrous opinions of her companions, her eyes scarcely turned an instant from the lugger, on which they seemed to be riveted by a sort of fascination. Had there been one there sufficiently unoccupied to observe this interesting girl, he might have been ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in carried no books, nor did he look like one who had ever been associated with them. Carefully dressed in the very worst of taste from his scarfpin to his boots, he had evidently just been too carefully shaved, for there were scratches on his wide, ludicrous face, and his smile was as rueful ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... that the free blacks corrupt the morals of the slaves, is too ludicrous to need a serious refutation. Corrupt the morals of those who are recognized and treated as brutes, and who know as little of the laws of God as of the laws of the land! Immaculate creatures! The system of slavery is constantly developing new excellencies: it is, we now perceive, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... heard nothing of it all, till he raised his head, and seeing many of the scholars trying to conceal their laughter, and even observing an expression of quiet mirth on Mr. Oswald's face, he looked from one to another with such a ludicrous manner of enquiry and astonishment it made the matter still worse. But, whatever Mr. Lawrence may lack in any way, is more than made up to us in Mr. Oswald. He is past thirty years of age, he is married, and has a little boy and girl who attend school. The little boy is very nice, and if I ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... exceedingly poor eater of meat, always had to be pressed to it, and often would not take it till we brought in the cat. The malicious looks that he cast at her from under his eyebrows on such occasions were exceedingly ludicrous, considering his utter disinclination to injure her. Whenever he saw her, he drew near his bicker and looked angry; but still he would not taste till she was brought to it, and then he cocked his tail, set up his ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... the face of the captain cleared, and as he gazed upon the unpleasant face and figure of this weather-worn spinster, the idea that any one with matrimonial intentions should "step forward," as she put it, struck him as being so extremely ludicrous ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... pleasure of a calendar pencil-case in comparison with the doubt and torture of mind occasioned by the sense of the debt, and the constant reproach of that fellow's scowling eyes and gloomy, coarse reminders? How was I to pay off such a debt out of sixpence a week? ludicrous! Why did not some one come to see me, and tip me? Ah! my dear sir, if you have any little friends at school, go and see them, and do the natural thing by them. You won't miss the sovereign. You don't know what a blessing it ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... character and ragged, faded forms, cluster in the porch; such a set as one might once have seen put up at auction as a 'refuse lot' of plantation negroes. The men wear old army cloaks, while the women, with dresses in every stage of decay, are so comic, one struggles between the ludicrous and the pitiful.... The faith of this class seems to be fastened nowhere so strongly as upon Mrs. Griffing. Salutations follow her along the streets, enough to satisfy the proudest Pharisee, and it provokes one between a smile and a tear, to see the women waiting timidly, yet eagerly, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... petition, and the grave answer which the King was advised to give to such a ludicrous appeal, are preserved in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1765, p. 95; where also we learn that Mr. Walpole's idea of the Carpenters' petition was put in practice, and his Majesty was humbly entreated to wear a wooden leg himself, and to enjoin all ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... ways of dogs, he overestimated Chum, of course, and valued his society and his good opinion far more highly than the average man would have done. Thus, perhaps, his desire to stand well in the dog's esteem had in it more that was commendable than ludicrous. Or perhaps not. ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... one in ten of them rises even to mediocrity as a dancer. A few degrees lower in the social scale, and it would be not one in twenty. Amid the shoving, shouldering, shuffling mob of dancers in an ordinary ball-room, the absence of all grace amounts even to the ludicrous. Forty years long have people been dancing the quadrilles now in vogue, which consist of six favourite country-dances, fashionable in Paris at the close of the last century, and then singly known by the names they still retain—"La Poule, L'Ete, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... style defying all imitation. Who can fail to recognise the quaint head, into which he seems to have thrown such singular character by the mere turn of his chisel, and which, when imitated, always partakes of the ludicrous, and betrays the unhappy copyist who is unable to compass that necessary turn! In matters of the highest art it is always so; the possessor of genius is constantly showing some last resort, as it were, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... savages. Volley after volley awakened the numerous echoes. Hundreds of savages were killed, hundreds wounded, and thousands ran howling into the woods. The Latin-Grammar-Master had a spare night-cap lent him, and a longtail coat which he wore hind side before. He presented a ludicrous though pitiable ...
— Captain Boldheart & the Latin-Grammar Master - A Holiday Romance from the Pen of Lieut-Col. Robin Redforth, aged 9 • Charles Dickens
... Pablo was too ludicrous, and Kay sat down on the edge of the porch and laughed until she wept. Then, as Pablo still stood truculently in the doorway, waiting an answer to his query, she called to Murray, who had rushed to the aid of the potato ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... get him ready for his next mental step. He had jumped off the tower; true; but he was alive and well, with no bones broken. What should he do now? Should he try to tear the tower down? The attempt would not be so very ludicrous, seeing he should only have to join those—socialists, anarchists, faddists—already at the work. But he admired the tower, and preferred to see is stand. If he did anything at all, it would be to try to creep ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... said; and astonishment left most of Tom's mates little breath for chaff. That he, the faithful one, should turn from the idol to strange goddesses, was a shock to the romantic and a warning to the susceptible. It was comical to see the airs our Thomas put on; for the most ludicrous parts of the affair were kindly buried in oblivion by the few who knew them, and Tom burst forth as a full-blown hero who had rescued the maiden from a watery grave, and won her gratitude and love by ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... ludicrous public, who snarl at the carpenter and shoemaker if the fitness of things be not observed; we, the shrewd critics, who pillory the luckless painter who dresses a gentleman of the Restoration in the ruff of James First's court, gaze calmly on the most ridiculous anachronisms ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... have no idea that you are near them, you will note two characteristic things. First, when they are traveling—and Mooween is the most restless tramp in all the woods—you will see that the cubs follow the mother closely and imitate her every action with ludicrous exactness, sniffing where she sniffs, jumping where she jumps, rising on their hind legs, with forearms hanging loosely and pointed noses thrust sharp up into the wind, on the instant that she rises, and then drawing silently away from ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... of the village priests were convicted as aiders and abettors of the attack on the abbey, and twenty were summarily hanged. Nearly two hundred persons remained under sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged on in the King's Courts. At last matters ended in a ludicrous outrage. Irritated by repeated breaches of promise on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, robbed and bound him, and carried him off to London. There he was hurried from street to street lest his hiding-place should be detected till opportunity ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... adopted by the Japanese as a mark of superior culture, yet these practices were carried to a much greater extent in Japan than was ever thought of in their original home. We shall see in the story of Japanese times the amazing and ludicrous extent to which the abdication of reigning sovereigns was carried. We shall witness even the great and sagacious Ieyasu himself, after holding the office of shogun for only two years, retiring in favor of his son Hidetada, and yet from his ...
— Japan • David Murray
... here, perhaps, to explain why we always call our machines "Willies." When the tanks were first being experimented upon, they evolved two, a big and a little one. Standing together they looked so ludicrous, that they were nicknamed "Big" and "Little Willie." The name stuck; and now, no one in the Corps refers to his machine in ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... passengers on their first passing the equinoctial line: a riotous and ludicrous custom, which from the violence of its ducking, shaving, and other practical jokes, is becoming annually less in vogue. It is esteemed a usurpation of privilege to baptize ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... more by my tyrant, I was stationed, like other reporters and radiomen, in a captive balloon. For the utmost in discomfort and lack of dignity let me recommend this ludicrous invention. Cramped, seasickened, inconvenienced—I don't like to mention this, but provisions for answering the calls of nature were, to say the least, inadequate—I swayed and rocked in that inconsiderable basket, chilled, blinded by the dazzle of the salt, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the happy-go-lucky Hicks, as the behemoth Butch and Beef seized him, swinging him aloft with ludicrous ease, "Police! Fire! Murder! Take care of my banjo, Monty. Tell all the fellows at old Bannister I died game, and plant Hair-Trigger Bill with his boots on! Oooo, Beef, Butch, have a ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Minds of Men are indeed very differently disposed; and the Reliefs from Care and Attention are of one Sort in a great Spirit, and of another in an ordinary one. The Man of a great Heart and a serious Complexion, is more pleased with Instances of Generosity and Pity, than the light and ludicrous Spirit can possibly be with the highest Strains of Mirth and Laughter: It is therefore a melancholy Prospect when we see a numerous Assembly lost to all serious Entertainments, and such Incidents, as should move one sort of Concern, excite in them a quite ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... one, however. Ludicrous as is the antithesis, the fact it expresses is not less disastrous. As remarks a suggestive writer, the first requisite to success in life is "to be a good animal;" and to be a nation of good animals is the first condition to national ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... the scene was ludicrous; but only for an instant. With a volley of awful oaths, his face suffused with the scarlet of mortification and rage, the captain regained his feet, and with a terrific blow felled the sailor ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of keeping Easter; agreement as to the mode of administering baptism; and hearty co-operation in mission work among the heathen. We may leave out of consideration alleged miracles; also the curious, or even the ludicrous, test of a divine mission suggested by "the aged hermit" of the story. The Celtic bishops refused any sort of co-operation, and Augustine left them, not without a solemn warning: "If they would not have peace with their brethren, they would have to accept war from their enemies; ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... humours of his company: but he himself is generally the greatest original at his table. He is very good-humoured, talks much, and laughs without ceasing. I am told that all the use he makes of his understanding at present, is to excite mirth, by exhibiting his guests in ludicrous attitudes. I know not how far we may furnish him with entertainment of this kind, but I am resolved to beat up his quarters, partly with a view to laugh with the knight himself, and partly to pay my respects to his lady, a good-natured sensible woman, with whom he lives upon very easy ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the others. It was almost savage in its still austerity. Cesare Orsi, too, said little, which was extraordinary for him. If Lavinia had made small mark on Mochales, at least she had overpowered the other to a ludicrous degree. It seemed that he had never before half observed her; he even muttered to himself and smiled uncertainly when she chanced ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... see Haig. More than ever now was she determined to solve his mystery. So Huntingdon's "surprise" was a greater shock to her than he, simple man, could possibly have foreseen or perceived. But even if she had not been moved by his rather ludicrous disappointment she would not have dared to refuse acquiescence in his programme. She had indeed expressed an ardent—oh, too ardent!—desire to go camping, and any explanation she could think of on the instant would have led her into regions where ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... prophecy of evil to himself, would getting Christ out of the boat help him much? The facts would remain the same. The departure of the physician does not tend to cure the disease; and thus the cry,' Go away from me because I am sinful,' was all but ludicrous if it had not been so tragical in its misapprehension of the facts of the case and the cure ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... suddenly aware that his right arm was crooked and not strong enough to lift heavy burdens, while the two remaining carriers had never loaded a mule in their lives. The first two directed the other pair how to proceed, and thus I was treated to the ludicrous spectacle of four men engaged in packing one mule. Naturally it took all day to load my ten animals, and when this was accomplished, it was too late to start, so that the day's work turned out to ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... life, the sense for concrete, simple things, the sense for things remembered, of tragedy expected but not feared, the feeling for men, as men; for places, as places; for things, as things; for the emotions, as the ironies of life; for the ludicrous, as the surface aspect of the pathetic—for the whole male side of existence which poetry for a hundred years has ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... then, have proved effectual and lasting. The account given in the Memorables and the Magnalia, of the conduct of these children, under the treatment of Mather and the other Ministers, is, indeed, most ludicrous; and no one can be expected to look at it in any other light. He was forewarned that, in printing it, he would expose himself to ridicule. He tells us that the mischievous, but bright and wonderfully gifted, girl, the eldest of the children, getting, at one time, possession of his manuscript, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... standing by the gate, and from my perch on the back of the off-wheeler, I smiled down on her with boyish self-assurance. The idea of my tumbling into the water! The idea of my drowning even did I meet with so ludicrous a mishap! But I was accustomed to my mother's anxious care, for as an only child there had fallen to me a double portion of maternal solicitude. In moments of stress and pain it came as a grateful balm; yet more often, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... Killarney, and after he had been there a couple of days he proceeded to describe Kerry to me, who had been managing one fifth of it for several years. His agricultural reforms would have been as drastic as they were ludicrous had any one attempted to carry them out, but when expatiating on them to me, he was not even aware that there was any difference between an English and an Irish acre. When I heard that he was taking charge of the whole army in South Africa, I mentioned that ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... shrill squeak which I heard—something unutterably ludicrous. I could scarce forbear laughing, as I looked at the little blockade-runner, with disordered hair, dirty face, torn clothes, and bleeding nose, uttering curses, and moaning in agony over the loss ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... around, recognized me with a ludicrous endeavor to relapse into the fiery and outraged patriot. He expended his temper on the red nose. "Take care whom you speak to," he cried in a high, portly voice, and pointing to my japanned box, which I had slung upon a curtain-hook. "Monsieur is not an attache of the house. Monsieur ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... sustained, and a somewhat clumsy introduction of supernatural machinery. Yet they have a power of engaging the attention in the rapid succession of startling and uncanny incidents and in adventures in which the horrible is sometimes dangerously near the ludicrous. Brown had not a particle of humor. Of literary art there is little, of invention considerable; and while the style is to a certain extent unformed and immature, it is neither feeble nor obscure, and admirably serves the author's purpose of creating what the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... This ludicrous yearning for a Norman ancestry is responsible for many of the absurdities in the pedigrees of even our most exalted families. Thus it is that we find such statements as this widely circulated, and accepted with a quite ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... give him. She did not tell her brother how like a demoniac his friend had behaved. To Marie she was more explicit; to her she repeated as nearly as possible the whole scene as it had occurred; and although Agatha was almost weeping with sorrow, there was so much that was ludicrous in the affair, that Marie could not keep ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... venerable article of the Christian faith, but as popularly presented this truth has become so distorted as to be falsehood. It narrows religion and belittles God. It is dishonouring to human nature, and is absolutely ludicrous as an interpretation of the cosmic process. Of course, the dogmatic theologian will maintain that this is a caricature of the way in which the relationship of God to the world is set forth in religious treatises and from the Christian pulpit. But is it? I think I can appeal with confidence ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... does seem ludicrous; and no doubt if I had been there I must have been strongly tempted to laugh at the comical spectacle those six pigs must have presented. But it is the spirit of the thing that looks so bad. Growdy never harmed a boy in his life, he says, and only wants to be let alone; but they went ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... are mistaken, master," said the physician, arranging his spectacles with an air of self-conceit, which, under other circumstances, would have been irresistibly ludicrous. ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... his dreams were music," [Footnote: The Poet's Sleep.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. There was surely no reason why Keats' title, Sleep and Poetry, should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in the middle ages,—and even the prominence of Night Thoughts in eighteenth ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... a moment of unutterable shame and misery; yet, I clearly remember seeing Fanny, the sweet Fanny herself, fall into an arm-chair nearly suffocated with convulsions of laughter. I cannot go on; what I did I know not. I suppose my exit was additionally ludicrous, for a new eclat de rire followed me out. I rushed out of the theatre, and wrapping only my cloak round me, ran without stopping to the barracks. But I must cease; these are woes too sacred for even confessions like mine, so let me close the curtain ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... amusing, swinging themselves from the branches of tall trees, leaping, flying almost, in pursuit of one another for mere fun, that it was sad to put them in prison, where they never lived long, and where they only exhibited a ludicrous and humiliating parody on the habits ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... grand and heroic, passing the best years of her womanhood in preparing dishes for the appetite of a dyspeptic husband, in looking after house-linen, and arranging lessons for a child. Matilda Blind says "This affects one with something of the ludicrous disproportion of making use of the fires of Etna ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... up "The Lady Shore" smashed history into smithereens in their rabid and frenzied effort to make her an exquisite impersonation of nearly all the virtues. It was, in fact, grotesque and ludicrous. With any old history book staring them in the face, they treated Jane Shore precisely as though she were the heroine of a dime novel. They had no qualms. They lopped great wads from her past, and huge excrescences from her present, and by the time that she had reached the last act, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Herr Thade von Burgk, whose acquaintance I had made before on the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of the Dresden Choral Society, when he had made a speech which was well intentioned but wearisome to the point of being ludicrous. The recollection of this speech returned to me with peculiar irony, now that his cannon were being fired from the barricade upon the enemy. I felt a still deeper impression, however, when, towards eleven o'clock, I saw the old Opera House, in which a few ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... originating, I suppose, in our respective circumstances, sprung up between me and these people, notwithstanding the ludicrous disparity in our years. But I never allowed myself to be prevailed upon to accept any invitation to eat and drink with them out of their stock (knowing that they got on badly with the butcher and baker, and had often not too much for themselves), until Mrs. Micawber ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... was beatific. He heard the peons acclaim him, as gradually they began to understand that there was to be no more unhappiness. But it was curious how far, far away the sweet music sounded, even when some belated "Viva el Senor Emperador!" cracked in ludicrous falsetto. For the poet-prince these human chords might have been the strings of a harp, softly touched. And ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... But it was ludicrous when the coffee began to boil to see those chaps elevate their noses and begin to sniff the fragrance as only wretched beings may who have long been strangers to ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... fit. The spectacle of that heavy German Muse, with her feet crammed into pointed slippers, executing, with incredible conscientiousness, now the stately measure of a Versailles minuet, and now the spritely steps of a Parisian jig, would be either ludicrous or pathetic—one hardly knows which—were it not so certainly neither the one nor the other, but simply dreary with an unutterable dreariness, from which the eyes of men avert themselves in shuddering dismay. Frederick himself felt that there was something wrong—something, but not really ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... "Really, that's ludicrous," said Coleman, with a forced laugh. "You don't mean to doubt me, I hope," and Madison Coleman drew himself ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger
... stated that Soma was the man that Leith had picked as first assistant. The big Kanaka was placed in charge of the other five carriers, and he immediately imitated Leith by shrieking out orders and strutting about in a manner that was ludicrous. Professor Herndon was bubbling over with excitement. The stories which Leith had fed to him continuously concerning the remains of an extinct civilization had worked him up to a pitch that bordered on insanity, and it was ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... barrack-room, the spirit of exuberant merriment took possession of me. I wanted to do something ludicrous or desperate. I threw my pack into a corner, quickly divested myself of my tunic, rolled up my shirt sleeves, and struck the table such a blow with my clinched fist as to make the dishes jump off. Everybody looked around. My face must have been a picture ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... up and arched; the tail set low and straight down and anything but a glad tail. His heart was of the finest, honest, loving, courageous, capable of hurling its owner to instant battle or death, in defence of the one loved, at other times rendering him, in its gentleness, an almost ludicrous spectacle of adoration. Of such was Wellington, and if the description is somewhat detailed and technical it is because he happens a good ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... their plans to her. She realized, however, that it was no more than a polite formality, for the affair long before had been taken out of her hands. Her consent to their wedding would sound hollow, even ludicrous, under the circumstances; still, such as it was, she freely granted it. Her objection had been the poverty of Mr. Storms, and that objection was disregarded. Mrs. Hanway-Harley could do no more; they would wed, and in later years, while ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... increase in size, style, and finish. The ordinary material is adobe, not only because it is cheap, but also because it best resists earthquake shocks. Fear of a terremoto has likewise led to a massiveness in construction which is slightly ludicrous when we see the poverty which it protects; the walls are often two or three feet thick. The ground floor is occupied by servants, whose rooms—small enough to be called niches—surround the paved court-yard, which is entered from the street by a broad ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... these burrows are placed together. On nearly every rim a small furry reddish-buff beast sat on his hind legs, looking, so far as head went, much like a young seal. These creatures were acting as sentinels, and sunning themselves. As we passed, each gave a warning yelp, shook its tail, and, with a ludicrous flourish of its hind legs, dived into its hole. The appearance of hundreds of these creatures, each eighteen inches long, sitting like dogs begging, with their paws down and all turned sunwards, is most grotesque. The Wish-ton-Wish ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... method of discrediting Bunce, and the referee vainly endeavoring to restore order. As for myself, in spite of my anxiety over the whole affair, I could not do otherwise than laugh heartily over Bunce's ludicrous mistake. When Hawkins was brought in from outside, and, after proclaiming his identity, denied ever being served in the original action, the referee was but little inclined to listen to Lawyer Bunce, who now corrected his testimony and swore just as insistently that the real Hawkins was ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... extravagant. She laughed at danger, laughed at the weaknesses and foibles of men, when he told of the political and social ambitions which stirred mankind in the outside world. But he knew that her merriment proceeded not from an ephemeral sense of the ludicrous, but from a righteous appraisal of the folly and littleness of those things for which the world so ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... laugh. Born in savagery, having lived in savagery all their lives and known naught else, their sense of humour was correspondingly savage. To them, the sight of a stunned and possibly dead puppy was a side-splitting, ludicrous event. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... is not an arrangement which seems right on the face of it. Treaties are quite as important as most laws, and to require the elaborate assent of representative assemblies to every word of the law, and not to consult them even as to the essence of the treaty, is prima facie ludicrous. In the older forms of the English Constitution, this may have been quite right; the power was then really lodged in the Crown, and because Parliament met very seldom, and for other reasons, it was then necessary that, on a multitude ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... had gone to the Thiers's, returned safely on his feet tied up in dusters. M. Thiers suggested dusters on the hands also, so as to go a quatre pattes; but Henry did not become a quadruped. I was horribly uneasy till he came in, but his was the ludicrous side of the question; of the tragic, I heard next day ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... by one, and made our way among the sleeping camels and horses, unobserved by any of their keepers. We next waited anxiously for the appearance of Ben; who, to our great satisfaction, at last came riding down the hill, and placed himself at our head,—when it was almost ludicrous to observe the air of unconcern he assumed as he rode forward at our head. The plain we had to pass was perfectly open, without a tree or shrub to conceal us, so that all we could hope for was that no suspicious eyes might be turned in the direction we were pursuing. On we went, wishing that ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... tourniquet principle, until the pain elicited a confession. But the Turk, stimulated to retaliation by his triumph, bagged the Greek's basket, which contained amongst other things two watches, which their present owner had no doubt stolen. Driven to the most ludicrous show of despair, the Greek was about to attempt another desperate struggle for the recovery of his goods, when two Zouaves elbowed their small persons upon the crowded stage, and were eagerly referred to by all the parties concerned in the squabble. How they contrived ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... heart a grammar or a compendium, repeating well and imitating well—that," writes a former Minister of Public Instruction, M. Jules Simon, "is a ludicrous form of education whose every effort is an act of faith tacitly admitting the infallibility of the master, and whose only results are a belittling of ourselves and ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... performance on. Sam's first attempt was brief. He was not half on when he was flung to the ground. Half a dozen attempts, quickly repeated, were scarcely better, the last one permitting him to remain on Barney's back nearly ten seconds, and culminating in a ludicrous fall over Barney's head. Sam withdrew from the ring, shaking his head dubiously and holding his side as if in pain. The other lads followed. Expert tumblers, they executed most amazing and side-splitting fails. Sam recovered and came back. Toward the last, all three made a ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... said Sam. "They don't see how ludicrous their suggestions are that we should actually retire and let these countries relapse into barbarism. As that fellow said at Havilla, they have no ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... his eyes. He leaned back and began to speculate disgustedly upon the events of the day. Married at noon—torn from his wife within an hour—in London at night—a murder—and now a wild chase to Brussels after a snuff box. It seemed almost ludicrous. He smiled grimly. He had not expected to spend in quite this way the first twelve hours of ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... that devoting one day a week to the nominal service of God and six to the real, practical service of Mammon, you earn the right to call yourselves Christians, that is to say, followers of Christ, you are merely practising a pitiful piece of self-deception which would be ludicrous were ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... had enough of it, and very little damage was done on either side. The scene was more ludicrous than tragic. After all, it was well, perhaps, that these men had not learnt how to use their fists, and that with them pushing, slapping, and rolling upon one ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the "tiring-room" have always presented themselves in a ludicrous light to the ordinary observer. There is always a jumble of incongruous articles, and a striking contrast between the ambitious pretensions of things and their real meanness—between the facts and fictions of theatrical life. Mr. Collier quotes from Brome's comedy, "The Antipodes," ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... preparations, the post joined in an effort to damp the aged preacher's hopes and to check his going. He was needed at Brannon, they said, so that the regiment could be rid of Matthews. His belief that he could talk peace terms to the hostiles was ludicrous. As for the Jamieson women, they were dead, or they would have been returned long since to save the four condemned from hanging. And his own life was to be uselessly endangered. Already, out upon the prairie, Indian scouts were ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... regret was intentionally ludicrous. Had Rachel been listening, she would once more have suspected a pose. But already she was deep in the article in the two-year-old magazine, or rather ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... now is at the front, on the field. We are to watch the details of a small part of the great expanse. As we approach, a ludicrous scene presents itself. A strong-armed artilleryman is energetically thrashing a dejected looking individual with a hickory bush, and urging him to the front. He has managed to keep out of many a fight, but now he must go in. The captain has detailed a man to whip him ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... reasonably expect to eclipse or even to equal, you crush him beneath the weight. If a poet were called John Milton or William Shakspeare, he could not dare to publish even a sonnet. No: the choice of a name lies between the two extremes of ludicrous insignificance and oppressive renown. For this reason I have ordered the family pedigree to be suspended on yonder wall. Let us examine it with care, and see whether, among the Chillinglys themselves ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... forward in the cab drumming idly with her forefingers upon the apron. In a few minutes he came back. His appearance was quite sufficient. He was very pale. The change in him was so ludicrous that ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pauper gentleman," he had no idea of the goal to which his imagination was leading him. There can be little doubt that all he contemplated was a short tale to range with those he had already written, a tale setting forth the ludicrous results that might be expected to follow the attempt of a crazy gentleman to act the part of a knight-errant in ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... market at Athens as sucking-pigs—a scene in which the convenient similarity of the Greek words signifying a pig and the 'pudendum muliebre' respectively is utilized in a whole string of ingenious and suggestive 'double entendres' and ludicrous jokes; another where the Informer, or Market-Spy, is packed up in a crate as crockery and carried off home by the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the emperor, "and it is true she wished to do me that honor. But I would not allow her, and preferred coming to you without being announced. In truth, it would be too ludicrous if the old Sibyl had served the emperor ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... were shackled; his movements became uncertain and spasmodic, menacing tables, chairs, vases, which, had they been gifted with consciousness, must have trembled at his approach; his nervous fingers thrust themselves into his hair, and threw it into ludicrous disorder; his countenance was suffused with scarlet; he stammered out something about bidding adieu, which the ladies were evidently at a loss to comprehend, until Maurice explained that M. de Bois expected to start on the morrow for ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... obeyed hastily. Hirst, a ludicrous but pitiable figure in knee-breeches and coat, a large wig all awry and his face a mess of grease paint, ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... suspense. Then the captain, the most anxious among us all, made a trumpet of his hands and shouted: "Here, Pete, old boy! Here, Pete, you black rascal!" At the sound of his voice the swimmer suddenly turned and struck out for the ship with an enthusiasm that was actually ludicrous. We roared with laughter—we could not help it; for when the boat had pulled up to the almost water-logged swimmer, and he began to climb in with an energy that imperiled the safety of the crew, we saw that the black ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... we conceive, be in worse taste in a fictitious narrative, than the wanton introduction of the ludicrous upon the solemn, but when in an historical tale these extremes do occur, fidelity forbids the suppression of the one, lest it should mar the effect of the other. Such is the necessity under ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... king who had a few weeks before been carried back in triumph to his capital with Mayor Petion in his coach. When we think of the pass to which things had come in Paris by this time, and of the unappeasable ferment that boiled round the court, there is a certain touch of the ludicrous in the notion of poor Richard Burke writing to Louis XVI. a letter of wise ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the ludicrous touched her; no, and if we bring reason to scan our laugh at pure humanity, it is we who are in the place of the ridiculous, for doing what reason disavows. Had he not named her, Carinthia, Saint and Martyr, from a first ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he had set in a corner he produced a sheaf of drawings. They depicted the adventures, mischievous, predatory, or criminal, of a pair of young hopefuls whose physiognomies and postures were genuinely ludicrous. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... had employed, the individual in black uttered several sentences in tones and with gestures which were intended to express a considerable degree of pathos, though it is possible that some people would have thought both the one and the other highly ludicrous. After a pause, Francis Ardry recommenced imitating the tones and the gestures of his monitor in the most admirable manner. Before he had proceeded far, however, he burst into a fit of laughter, in which I should, perhaps, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the big fellow. His right shin hurt like fury, but he would not stop to examine it, and covered the remaining distance to the door in very ludicrous limping jumps. Dashing around the front of the building, he reached the corner which gave him a view ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... nature is ever ready to bestow. This is almost a self-evident truth; and yet so confirmed is man in his sham maturity that it is quite common to see one look with contempt, and a sense of superiority which is ludicrous, upon another who is enjoying a child's game like a child. The trouble is that many of us are so contracted in and oppressed by our own self-consciousness that open spontaneity is out of the question and even inconceivable. The sooner we shake it off, the better. When the ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... candour, earnestness, and single-mindedness, and who have studied English medical works, have clubbed together to establish a dispensary, and, under Dr. Palm's instructions, are even carrying out the antiseptic treatment successfully, after some ludicrous failures! ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... unnecessary to look for any other in so plain a tale, altho, it is true, the conduct of the story produces impressions on the reader, to a certain extent, like those suggested by Sismondi. The melancholy tendency, however, is in a great degree counteracted by the exquisitely ludicrous character of the incidents. Perhaps, after all, if we are to hunt for a moral as the key of the fiction, we may with more reason pronounce it to be the necessity of proportioning ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... rope, leather, iron, steel, brass, and every thing else that could by any possibility be used for the purpose; the queer-looking postillion, with his long cue, huge boots, and pipe, all combine with the grotesque appearance of the Diligence itself, to form an ensemble irresistibly ludicrous. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... hooroos! that followed may be conceived, but cannot be described. Some of the men burst into laughter, for anything ludicrous is irresistible to an Eskimo of the very far north. A few were petrified. Others there were who resented this indignity to the heir-apparent, and flourished their spears in a threatening manner. These last Grabantak quieted with a look. The incident undoubtedly surprised ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... who played the hero was a very fine fellow; and yet when I conceive him making love to me as he did last night to Mrs. Colebrook, the notion seems really too ludicrous! ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... sailor's life is at best, but a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... mysticism and sublimity than the actual facts warranted. But once launched thereon, his sense of humour could not be denied its full enjoyment in this first telling of the entire tale. Full justice he did to the pathos, but he also shook with mirth over the ludicrous. As he quoted Mary Antony, the old lay-sister's odd manner and movements could be seen; her mumbling lips, and cunning wink. And here was Mother Sub-Prioress, ferret-faced and peering; and here Sister Mary Rebecca, long-nosed, flat-footed, eager ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... was ludicrous. There was no question but that his nose was grievously offended. Calhoun turned to the grid operator. He extended the sample of scavengers. The grid man clenched his teeth and took it. Then his face worked. He thrust it ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... might see a history written there of a sorrow that went deeper than that—a sorrow not tempered by any pleasure. On ordinary occasions this was the predominant expression of his countenance—mixed however at all times with something of a humorous aspect, a half fantastic sense of the ludicrous, and perhaps a few reliques of that sternness which at one time was said to have had some place in the composition of his character. But this had long given way to the influences of time and the softening hand of affliction: all harshness, that might once ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... he was paying his court, as a cuttlefish bone, a burlesque absurdity which amused readers who knew neither of the personages. A tale of the loves of the Heron, who tried in vain to swallow the Cuttlefish bone, which broke into three pieces when he dropped it, was irresistibly ludicrous. Everybody remembers the sensation which the pleasantry made in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; it was the first of a series of similar articles, and was one of the thousand and one causes which provoked the rigorous press legislation ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... remarked, 'Now you see how much better it is to look into such things. This room would have furnished me with bad dreams for the remainder of my life, and here I find it is only a commonplace kitchen. Think how ludicrous to have the horrors over a kitchen! Sha'n't I tell of your fright when we get home—how you didn't want to open the door, and wanted to 'let well enough alone'? The place might be haunted by the ghost of a chicken or a rabbit, but, my dear, you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... he was sometimes so surrounded by ladies, all asking to have their names put down in his lists as shareholders in the new stock, that, in spite of his well-known and habitual gallantry, he was obliged to tear himself away par force. The most ludicrous stratagems were employed to have an opportunity of speaking to him. One lady, who had striven in vain during several days, gave up in despair all attempts to see him at his own house, but ordered her coachman to keep a ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... phrase, very intelligibly, but very briefly. Mr. Sherwin—after referring to the business expedition on which he had been absent, for the purchase of silks at Lyons—asked him some questions about France and the French, which evidently proceeded from the most ludicrous ignorance both of the country and the people. Mr. Mannion just set him right; and did no more. There was not the smallest inflection of sarcasm in his voice, not the slightest look of sarcasm in his eye, while he spoke. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... sometime, conquer a great tract of country, civilize the negroes, found in that locality a new Poland, or even start at the head of a drilled black host for the old. As he felt, however, that there was something ludicrous in the idea and as he doubted whether his father would permit him to play the role of the Macedonian Alexander in Africa, he did not confide his plans to Nell, who certainly would be the only person in the ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... biographer, no historian, no artist, has grasp'd it—perhaps could not grasp it. It is so different, so far outside our standards of eminent humanity. Their feathers, paint—even the empty buffalo skull—did not, to say the least, seem any more ludicrous to me than many of the fashions I have seen in civilized society. I should not apply the word savage (at any rate, in the usual sense) as a leading word in the description of those great aboriginal specimens, of whom I ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and marry my neighbour's daughter—one of those Austin girls, for instance? Fancy my settling down to live with one them, and undertaking to look after her all my life; walking after her carrying a parasol and a shawl. Don't you see the ludicrous side? I always see a married man carrying a parasol and a shawl—a parasol and a shawl, the symbols of his office.' ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... hain't any 'bjection to my giving the laugh to Bill?" he said, with ludicrous dismay; "there ain't nothing wrong ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... Londonderry, viz. let-be for let-be—but if wounded, he is dangerous in the extreme. You should always, therefore, hunt him in couples, and have a shot in reserve, or a goodly cudgel, ready to apply to the root of his nose, where he is as vulnerable as Achilles was in the heel. Some ludicrous stories are told of bear-hunting; for Bruin is rather a humorist in his way. A friend of mine, with his surveying party, ten men in all, once treed a very large one; they immediately cut clubs, and set to work to fell the tree. Bruin seemed inclined to maintain his position, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... Jersey when it rains is to let it rain; and what I did when he pounded was to let him pound. I was perfectly willing he should pound; I even hoped that he enjoyed it. In spite of the anxiety I felt for poor Kate, I could not help laughing at the ludicrous earnestness with which he swore and pounded. Like most men, my uncle was cool when he was not excited; and as there had been nothing on the present occasion to excite him, I suppose he was cool. Doubtless he stopped to dress himself before he answered the ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... was also a Trimmer by the constitution both of his head and of his heart. His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections; his taste refined; his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration. Such a man could not long be constant to any band of political allies. He must not, however, be confounded with the vulgar crowd ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by far their finest possession, which, with their large almond-shaped eyes, is invariably of a black color. I once saw a Chinaman with red hair, and you cannot think how ludicrous his queue looked beside the sable tails of his brethren. The manner in which the women dress their hair is most wonderful, and materially helps to give them their uninviting appearance. They have a fashion of sticking it out ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... 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 villain is punished and virtue is ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... extravagance of his horse-racing son Pheidippides has involved him, seeks to enter the youth as a student in the Thinking-shop or Reflectory of Socrates, that he may learn to make the worse appear the better reason, and so baffle his creditors before a jury. The young man, after much demur and the ludicrous failure of his father, who at first matriculates in his stead, consents. He listens to the pleas of the just and unjust argument in behalf of the old and new education, and becomes himself such a proficient that he demonstrates, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... superiority of spiritual power over sensuous, and usher in the dawn of God's creation, wherein they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels. To abolish marriage at this period, [15] and maintain morality and generation, would put inge- nuity to ludicrous shifts; yet this is possible in Science, although it is ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... which they could dismember themselves, and ran in the wildest disorder in a mad effort to escape. As the chase went on the panic increased, the clouds of dust from the road causing an intermingling of friend and foe. In a little while the affair grew most ludicrous, Faulkner's hatless and coatless men taking to the woods in such dispersed order and so demoralized that a good many prisoners were secured, and those of the enemy who escaped were hunted until dark. When the recall was sounded, our men ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... life to which he belongs, it will be worse for all of us than for the fame of his creator. Nor, when faith is lost in that possible combination of eccentricities and benevolences, shrewdness and simplicity, good sense and folly, all that suggests the ludicrous and nothing that suggests contempt for it, which form the delightful oddity of Pickwick, will the mistake committed be one merely of critical misjudgment. But of this there is small fear. Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... ponderous enrichments and furniture of the time of Louis XIV. (that most showy and barbarous of all tastes, which has nothing in it of the graceful, nothing of the picturesque, and which, nowadays, people who should know better imitate with a ludicrous servility), he found sixteen persons assembled. His host stepped up from a circle which surrounded him, and formally presented his new visitor to the rest. He was struck with the likeness which the sister ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... we have it! It is this genteel poverty I have managed to drop into—! [Crosses the room.] That is what makes life so pitiable! So utterly ludicrous!—For that's what ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... Arthur, the last Celtic king of Britain, and of the knights of the Round Table. Another class of romances of chivalry related to the court of Charlemagne. The Fabliaux in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were largely composed of tales of ludicrous adventures. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of Mr. Jacobs' books, or any of Dickens', enjoyed greater popularity than fell to Mr. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat? In this book the humour sprang in no sense out of character; nor did it even spring out of situations contrived with especial skill. It consisted of a series of ludicrous impressions such as that of a man sitting on a pat of butter. Well, a man sitting on a pat of butter is a funny thing—when it happens naturally in life. But a collection of incidents, each of which might be funny if it happened ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... quickly "time doth transfix the flourish set on youth," there is something strange, even a trifle ludicrous, in the thought that Zeus, after all these years, is still at the beck and call of his passions. And it seems anyhow lamentable that he has not yet gained self-confidence enough to appear in his own person to the lady of his choice, and is still at pains to transform himself into whatever ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... in the square, beneath our windows: Shelley read to us his "Ode to Liberty"; and was riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair. He compared it to the 'chorus of frogs' in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous association suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical drama on the circumstances of the day, to which the pigs would serve as chorus—and "Swellfoot" was begun. When finished, it was ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... quaint," said Mr Tippet, with a smile; "but there is a great deal of truth in them. No doubt, the connection of such ideas, especially as put by you, sounds a little ludicrous; but when we come to analyse them, we see their possibility, for, if a lever of the size indicated by the ancient philosopher were erected (and theoretically, the thing is possible), then the subordinate arrangements ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... of powers than that which is involved in giving a man such faculties and capacities, if this be the only field on which they are to be exercised. If you think of what most of us do in this world, and of what it is in us to be, and to do, it is almost ludicrous to consider the disproportion. All other creatures fit their circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their environment. They find in life a field for every power. You and I do not. 'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... of the Kayser, not to be found in any Roman historian, and full of quaint and ludicrous jumbles of the ancient and the modern, I was suddenly stopped by finding that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... of blank astonishment with which these words were received would have been ludicrous but for the ominous thickening ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... came to the word see, she insisted that it should be seed in the imperfect; and upon going down to dinner, she asked if it was eat, eated; but being told it was eat, ATE, she seemed to try to express the idea that this transposition of the letters was not only wrong, but ludicrous, for she laughed heartily. She continued this habit of forming words analogically. When she had become acquainted with the meaning of the word restless, she seemed to understand that less at the end ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... of man, his tyrannical indifferences, his little list of questions and answers which suffices for his wisdom, these are the chief phenomena or symptoms of his sanity. He alone has survived the ages by means of a series of ludicrous adjustments, until today he walks on two legs—the crowning absurdity of an otherwise logical Nature. He has triumphed by specializing in his weaknesses and insuring their survival; by disputing the simple laws of biology with interminable banalities labelled ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... up suddenly at a sign from Rutton, with a ludicrous shrug of his huge shoulders disclaiming any ill-intent or wrong-doing; and while Rutton remained deep in thought by the table, the babu held silence, his gaze flickering suspiciously round the room, searching the shadows, questioning the closed door behind which Doggott lay asleep (evidence ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... 'cowardliness,' or 'sluggishness.' And if we pursue the enquiry, we find that these opposite characters are naturally at variance, and can hardly be reconciled. In lesser matters the antagonism between them is ludicrous, but in the State may be the occasion of grave disorders, and may disturb the whole course of human life. For the orderly class are always wanting to be at peace, and hence they pass imperceptibly into the condition of slaves; and the courageous sort are always wanting to go to war, even when ...
— Statesman • Plato
... beauties; since indeed all poetic excellence of a comic description can be felt only by those who are familiar not only with the poetic language, but also with all those minute local and historical circumstances, the allusions to which contribute so frequently to augment the ludicrous. ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... I stammered in confusion, when I recalled the ludicrous scene, 'how foolish I must ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... military struggle, and their prejudice of generations greatly intensified the gloomy apprehensions they no doubt honestly felt. Yet even allowing for this, the exaggerated language in which they described it became absolutely ludicrous. The Confederate War Department early declared Generals Hunter and Phelps to be outlaws, because they were drilling and organizing slaves; and the sensational proclamation issued by Jefferson Davis on December 23, 1862, ordered that Butler and his commissioned ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... "nothing. You have been most exemplary; you have not even got any entertainment out of it. The thing never struck you as possible. It was too ludicrous!" ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... Brass. 'He has such extraordinary spirits! His humour is so extremely playful! Judas! Oh yes—dear me, how very good! Ha ha ha!' All this time, Sampson was rubbing his hands, and staring, with ludicrous surprise and dismay, at a great, goggle-eyed, blunt-nosed figure-head of some old ship, which was reared up against the wall in a corner near the stove, looking like a goblin or hideous idol whom the dwarf worshipped. A mass of timber on its ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness, because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous and ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church |
