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There was something terribly deliberate in her strangeness; it was full of awe to the beholder, more searching and painfully pitiful than melancholy. Coarse hands fell away from wanton waists; ribaldry hesitated; hot faces drew apart; and all at once a girl with a crackling laugh threw a tin cup of liquor into the fire.

I had the strength to cut a step or two of a jig, and cry out some ribaldry, which saved me for that time; but my legs were like water when I must get down into the skiff among these miscreants; and what with my horror of my company and fear of the monstrous billows, it was all I could do to keep an Irish tongue and break a jest or two as we were pulled aboard.

The ephemeral and now forgotten lights of the British stage the blasting indecencies of Beaumont and Fletcher; the vigorous ribaldry of Dryden; the shocking extravagances of the recent French and Spanish stage; the Tour de Nesle, and other elevating pieces, which adorn the modern Parisian theatre, and train to virtuous and generous feeling the present youth of France.

For good books, they might lie in his master's house till they rotted from him, he would not regard to look into them; but contrariwise, would get all the bad and abominable books that he could, as beastly romances, and books full of ribaldry, even such as immediately tended to set all fleshly lusts on fire.

The ribaldry of Etherege and Wycherley was, in the presence and under the special sanction of the head of the Church, publicly recited by female lips in female ears, while the author of the Pilgrim's Progress languished in a dungeon for the crime of proclaiming the gospel to the poor.

"That isn't true, is it, Captain?" whispered Grigosie. "We know better than that." Ellerey laughed, but he was not displeased to keep the lad in low conversation. The song had let loose a flood of jest and anecdote which lost none of their ribaldry in the telling. They were ill suited for a boy to hear and batten on. "Yes, lad; we know better, you and I," he said.

As it was, fought on front and flank, with the thunders of the Church, and the ribaldry of malicious tongues to scatter their venomed darts abroad, Parnell was a doomed man. Not that he lacked indomitable courage or loyal support.

There was no Puritanism in him, he was up to any fun, sung his song at a cricket or foot-ball dinner as joyfully as the youngest of the party; but if mirth sank into coarseness and ribaldry, that instant Patteson's conduct was fearless and uncompromising....

Chaucer makes another manner of apology for his broad speaking, and Boccace makes the like; but I will follow neither of them. Our countryman, in the end of his characters, before the Canterbury tales, thus excuses the ribaldry, which is very gross in many of his novels.

He himself could out-do them all in coarse ribaldry of the sex, but they should not make a mock and flash obscene jests at the mention of Caroline de St. Castin! They should never learn her name. He could not trust one of them with the secret of her removal. And yet some one of them must perforce be entrusted with it!