United States or Fiji ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
By 1837, having lost his fortune of five hundred pounds a year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to Fraser's, and thereafter to the New Monthly, Cruikshank's Comic Almanac, Punch, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by "Michael Angelo Titmarsh," Yellowplush Papers, and all manner of skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the Great Hoggarty Diamond and the Luck of Barry Lyndon.
This was in the last part of the freshman year, and later on I became a sort of amateur, class poet-laureate. Many were the skits I composed, and Tom sang them.... During that freshman year we often encountered Hermann Krebs, whistling merrily, on the stairs. "Got your themes done?" he would inquire cheerfully. And Tom would always mutter, when he was out of earshot: "He has got a crust!"
You may know that he was out at the Khyber Pass seven years ago, as the war correspondent of the Telegraph, and he ran over Cabul at the time of the Penj-Deh incident. He has prepared a series of varied skits and personal items covering the visit incognito of Prince Djiddin, a Thibetan noble of ancient and shadowy lineage.
This was in the last part of the freshman year, and later on I became a sort of amateur, class poet-laureate. Many were the skits I composed, and Tom sang them.... During that freshman year we often encountered Hermann Krebs, whistling merrily, on the stairs. "Got your themes done?" he would inquire cheerfully. And Tom would always mutter, when he was out of earshot: "He has got a crust!"
Its very familiarity makes it unnecessary to dwell much on it, but it is safe to say that nothing of the kind more brilliant has ever been written, or is very likely ever to be written, than the parodies of Southey's Sapphics and "Henry Martin" sonnet, the litany of the Jacobins, French and English, the "skits" on Payne Knight and Darwin, The Rovers, mocking the new German sentimentalism and mediævalism, and the stately satire of "The New Morality," where, almost alone, the writers become serious, and reach a height not attained since Dryden.
With the passing of the flagons an electric current of good fellowship flashed around the circle. Stories that would have been received with but a bare smile at the club were here greeted with shouts of laughter. Bon-mots, skits, puns and squibs mouldy with age or threadbare with use, were told with a new gusto and welcomed with delight.
I must tell you that he is still inflamed by the idea of his own paper, and his brain is in full eruption, sending out a perpetual stream of libellous paragraphs, doggerel poems, social skits, parodies, and articles. He brings them all to me, and my table is already piled with them. Here is his latest, brought up to my room after he had undressed.
Another shorter prose skit of du Maurier's which is included in the same book satirises the splendid sort of hero, who conceals beneath a mask of indifference the power to do anything on earth better than anybody else. These prose skits show the neat irony that Punch was willing to encourage by attaching du Maurier to the literary, as well as to the artistic, staff.
'Gudeness! wha could hae thought the like o' that o' him? Na, if it had been for debt, or e'en for a bit tuilzie wi' the gauger, the deil o' Nelly Mac-Candlish's tongue should ever hae wranged him. But if he really shot young Hazlewood but I canna think it, Mr. Glossin; this will be some o' your skits now. I canna think it o' sae douce a lad; na, na, this is just some o' your auld skits.
The whole evening was devoted to skits directed at the ministry, at the food administration, at the scandals in the interior department and the deputies, at the high taxes and the profiteering of the munition makers. The skits were done in dialogue, song and dance, and the various forms of burlesque. A good crowd but not a soldier crowd sat through it and applauded appreciatively.
Word Of The Day