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She even threw her slipper at a statue gilded like a shrine, twisting herself about from very ribaldry and allowed her bare foot, smaller than a swan's bill, to be seen. This evening she was in a good humour, otherwise she would have had the little shaven-crop put out by the window without more ado than her first bishop. "He has fine eyes, Madame," said one of her handmaids.
Nor have I, after the example of Juvenal, raked up that forgotten sink of filth and ribaldry, but laid before you things rather ridiculous than dishonest. And now, if there be anyone that is yet dissatisfied, let him at least remember that it is no dishonor to be discommended by Folly; and having brought her in speaking, it was but fit that I kept up the character of the person.
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.
It seemed as if the foul words of the barbarians were passed on thus to the man held responsible for Romans being compelled to listen to such insults. Curiously enough, the centurions and under officers appeared to be the only ones not hostile to Fabius' policy. These were silent or even made some efforts to restrain the ribaldry of their men.
These seventy subjects, which he gives you leave to call bad subjects, full of tricks and impudence, lust, lies, jokes, jests, and ribaldry, joined to the two portions here given, are, by the prophet! a small instalment on the aforesaid hundred.
'You're decent blokes I know, and you've all had mothers if you haven't had wives. Well, there's a lady up there she's my wife, and she's never heard bullock-drivers swear before, and you've scared her a bit. Just you stop it. Shut up and be off like good chaps. Some dissentient voices arose; an attempt at drunken ribaldry, strident hisses, 'Sh!
It is said that it is ludicrous to compare the mild humor of Rip Van Winkle with the "robustious fun of Swift". But this is a curious "derangement of epitaphs". Swift has wit, and satiric power, and burning invective, and ribaldry, and caustic, scornful humor; but fun, in any just sense, he has not. He is too fierce to be funny.
He would have addressed his wife as 'Blow-fly, or 'Sossidge, or 'Piggins, or by any of the ridiculous names of the sort that he affected, in the presence of the queen or his own handy lad. I have overheard similar expressions of playful ribaldry upon his wife's lips many a time, but never when I was obviously and officially in their presence. 'And what about pay, Nickperry?
He was soon launched, and as the little room filled, his pale and sunken cheeks grew red with excitement, his tongue was unloosed, and he poured out a continuous stream of blasphemous ribaldry such as would have shocked the ears of a revolutionist of the year '89 or of a pétroleuse of the nineteenth century. It seemed as though the spring once opened would never dry.
Though the Papemanes, on whom Rabelais has exhausted his grotesque humour and his caustic satire, have not yet walked off the stage, we pay a heavy price in the grossness of his ribaldry and his tiresome balderdash for odd stories and flashes of witty humour. Rabelais hardly finds readers even in France, with the exception of a few literary antiquaries.
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