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Louis was anxious for the King to come from Spain with his army, and for "the bear dance to begin." Brederode, noisy, bawling, and absurd as ever, was bringing ridicule upon the national cause by his buffoonery, and endangering the whole people by his inadequate yet rebellious exertions. What course was the Prince of Orange to adopt? He could find no one to comprehend his views.

Ninny Moulin had just taken hold of Rose Pompon with his right hand, and of the Queen with his left, in order to advance between the two, in which figure he showed off his buffoonery to the utmost extent, when the door again opened, and the same waiter, who had called out Jacques, approached Cephyse with an air of consternation, and whispered in her ear, as he had before done to Sleepinbuff.

Nevertheless we may give this warning, that the orator ought to use ridicule in such a way as neither to indulge in it too often, that it may not seem like buffoonery; nor in a covertly obscure manner, that it may not seem like the wit of a comedian; nor in a petulant manner, lest it should seem spiteful; nor should he ridicule calamity, lest that should seem inhuman; nor crime, lest laughter should usurp the place which hatred ought to occupy; nor should he employ this weapon when unsuitable to his own character, or to that of the judges, or to the time; for all such conduct would come under the head of unbecoming.

In social intercourse he is of so rare a courtesy and charm of manners that there is no man so melancholy that he does not gladden, no subject so forbidding that he does not dispel the tedium of it. From his boyhood he has loved joking, so that he might seem born for this, but in his jokes he has never descended to buffoonery, and has never loved the biting jest.

The hint she gave him that he was a coward, by saying she would eat all he had killed, he did not regard, knowing himself to be a brave man; but there is nothing that great wits so much dread as the imputation of buffoonery, because the charge comes sometimes a little too near the truth: therefore Benedick perfectly hated Beatrice when she called him "the prince's jester."

Villemot meanwhile went off to chat with the justice of the peace and his clerk, assisting with professional coolness to affix the seals a ceremony which always involves some buffoonery and plentiful comments on the objects thus secured, unless, indeed, one of the family happens to be present.

In his youth, as he often confessed and lamented, he was gay, giddy and profligate; so fondly attached to the stage, that he joined a company of strolling actors and vagabonds, and spent a part of his life in that capacity. At this period it is probable he learned that grimace, buffoonery and gesticulation which he afterwards displayed from the pulpit.

The potent relic was, after such grimace and buffoonery as befitted the subject, presented successively to each of the female personages of the drama, not one of whom sustained the supposed test of discretion; but, to the infinite delight of the audience, sneezed much louder and longer than perhaps they themselves had counted on.

Another poet of the period, with a very different purpose, has left an elegy, in which he darkly hints at and bemoans the fate of the ill-starred young person, whose very uncommon calamity Whitelaw, Dunlop, and Milne thought a fitting subject for buffoonery and ribaldry.

"Thou hast forgotten to name thine own quality," cried Pippo, who was too much used to buffoonery not to relish the whim of Maso, and who, with Neapolitan fickleness, forgot his anger the instant he had given it vent. "I will represent the sapient public, and, being well disposed to be duped, the whole job is complete.