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I hardly know if I make myself understood, and yet I am unable to define my meaning more clearly when I say that there was something in her glance which suggested to the person appealed to, when in the presence of others, a certain idea of some individual responsibility for her sufferings, which, while it never failed to affect him with a mingled sense of ludicrousness and terror, always made an impression of unqualified gravity on the minds of the bystanders.
I could not resist the ludicrousness of the spectacle, and holding my sides I rocked back and forth in the first laughter which had passed my lips in many days; the first, in fact, since the morning Powell had left camp when his horse, long unused, had precipitately and unexpectedly bucked him off headforemost into a pot of frijoles.
Some of 'em have a lot of sense left." Johnnie nodded. "He doesn't know any of us," she said pitifully. "They've had him in the hospital three months, trying to do something for him; but the doctors say he'll never be well." "That's right hopeful," observed the man, with a plainly intentional, dry ludicrousness.
He puffed and gurgled, striving his best to smother the sense of ludicrousness that mastered him. To me there was small cause for merriment; the supreme terror of those moments merged into hot anger at the deception, and I crept forward eager to plant my hand upon the rascal's throat. "What French mockery is this?" I exclaimed, my hand hard upon his arm.
They must have seen much more plainly than I did the ludicrousness of their weak old kinsman's demand; yet Luke was still; Hector was still; and even John, and the three or four others I have mentioned gave forth no audible token of disdain or surprise.
Poison, or perhaps charcoal like the little cook? He did not fear the ludicrousness of this now; all that he feared was, that the courage to kill himself would fail him. He went on extending his time of grace from half-hour to half-hour. It was a horrible night, full of the agony of the last night of the criminal condemned to the scaffold.
Here now was a common ignorant Highland clown imagining that he could divert, as one does a child, DR SAMUEL JOHNSON! The ludicrousness, absurdity, and extraordinary contrast between what the fellow fancied, and the reality, was truly comick. It grew dusky; and we had a very tedious ride for what was called five miles; but I am sure would measure ten. We had no conversation.
This vivid picture of the effects of drunkenness leaves its sinfulness and its wider consequences out of sight, and fixes attention on the sorry spectacle which a man makes of himself in body and mind when he 'puts an enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains. Disgust and ridicule are both expressed. The writer would warn his 'son' by impressing the ugliness and ludicrousness of drunkenness.
Every man seemed crushed, officers and soldiers alike; when they broke ranks, they went and lay down like sheep where their tents used to be, or wandered disconsolately about, looking for their stray belongings. The scene was so infinitely dolorous that it gradually put me in the highest spirits; the ludicrousness of the whole affair was so complete, there was nothing to do but laugh.
And with all their extravagances of expression and questionable taste, the numerous stories which Southey delighted to versify on themes demoniac and diabolical, from the Devil's Walk to the True Ballad of St Antidius, are fraught with farcical import, and have an individual ludicrousness all their own.
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