Flaying

“ Lastly, they have read that most systems of rhetoric treat of the art of exciting laughter; therefore for the effecting of this they will sprinkle some jests and puns that must pass for ingenuity, though they are only the froth and folly of affectedness. Sometimes they will nibble at the wit of being satyrical, though their utmost spleen is so toothless, that they suck rather than bite, tickle rather than scratch or wound: nor do they ever flatter more than at such times as they pretend to speak with greatest freedom. ”

“ Disband your followers; and take heed you be not suddenly deserted by your employers."
"Boy!" said the outlaw, "you are not white-livered, or you would not say these things to me! Look you, I know your folly: it is not for me,—not because you love liberty and peace,—not because you have laid to heart the dotish words of a half crazed father,—that you are so cold and shameless; but because you have set your eyes on the baby face of a girl, who will laugh at you, when the last fit of your folly is over. ”

“ To begin with, the origin of all swearing was the same—the one intense dread of falsehood against which as yet no laws were sufficient to guard. Fancy the mortal distress of barbarian man when he first wakes to the belief that his enemies can, by smooth speech, wrest from his hands what his prowess or his labour has acquired. No art that he is aware of can pervert the action of tongues set falsely going. Seeing how illimitable is the crop of words, he may even imagine a plague of lies that will fall thick about him like locusts or caterpillars ”

“ The art of hard lying made easy, though I am made very uneasy by hard lying—I send my ruler as a missive, to let the parties concerned know that I am a rebel to tyrannical rule—I am arraigned, tried, and condemned without a hearing—What I lose in speech is made up in feeling, the whole wound up with magnanimous resolves, and a little sobbing. ”

“ For vice in others is abhorred of all,
And villains triumph when the worthless fall.
Not thus her sister Comedy prevails,
Who shoots at Folly, for her arrow fails;
Folly, by Dulness armed, eludes the wound,
And harmless sees the feathered shafts rebound;
Unhurt she stands, applauds the archer's skill,
Laughs at her malice, and is Folly still.
Yet well the Muse portrays, in fancied scenes,
What pride will stoop to, what profession means;
How formal fools the farce of state applaud;
How caution watches at the lips of fraud;
The wordy variance of domestic life ”

“ A satanic spirit of rebellion seems to have possessed you today. The fool pleases me, me, his king, and if I like him, how dare you say that he has no taste? You are the court scholar and he the court jester; each of you receives the same salary; the only difference is that he is dining at the little table with the foreign hunter. The jester plays the fool as we dine, while you entertain us with intelligent conversation ”

“ But they must needs write something original, something different from other men's thoughts; and immediately the censors and critics began to spy out heresy, or laxity of morals, and the fools were dealt with according to their folly. There used to be special houses of correction in those days, mad-houses built upon an approved system, for the special treatment of cases of this kind; mediaeval dungeons, an occasional application of the rack, and other gentle instruments of torture of an inventive age, were wonderfully efficacious in curing a man of his folly. ”

“ By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery they break out, and blood toucheth blood.” Here we see the brood of evils associated with lying. “A lying tongue,” says Solomon, “hateth those that are afflicted by it.” It not only afflicts, but hates them whom it does afflict—hates them under the calamity of which itself has been the cause. “A liar,” he again says, “giveth ear to a naughty tongue.” He listens to lies, to slander, to cursing, to profanity, and the various evils constituting a “naughty tongue.” ”

“ My folly mayhap shall delight thee, A song of fools I will recite thee, Lady fair—O list!” Herewith he sighed amain, but smiled anon, And fell anon to blither, louder note: “Sing hey, Folly—Folly ho, And here's a song of Folly, All 'neath the sun, Will gladly run Away from Melancholy. “And Fool, forsooth, a Fool am I, Well learned in foolish lore: For I can sing ye, laugh or sigh: Can any man do more? Hey, Folly—Folly, ho! 'Gainst sadness bar the door. “A Fool am I, yet by fair leave, Poor Fools have hearts to feel. ”

“ They ensnare their victims by equivocal forms of speech, and having thus obtained their consent virtually upon false pretences, they reveal to the confiding dupes the real meaning of the engagement they have entered into only at the last moment, when it is too late for them to escape the murderous knife. ”

“ I am informed that the legal view of abusive swearing is that, unless calculated to cause a breach of the peace, it is no offence. So that it is just possible to call a man a blasted fool in public. On the other hand, there is an offence in calling him plain and unqualified fool: that constitutes a libel and a penalty can be exacted. ”

“ The bauble of the Fool in "King Lear" rings us into a horizon that, before we reach it, mutters with the premonition of madness; and we wonder if any humor can find shelter with us underneath that blackening sky. When the Fool joins our company, we search his features in vain for a trace of Feste's and Touchstone's temper. That spring of geniality has been stirred by the king's misfortunes till it is roiled into irony; and we recognize the only tone that can take lodgings in this tragedy. ”

“ Sometimes, when I am cross and cannot sleep, I begin an angry contest with the opinions I object to. Into the room they flop, those bat-like monsters of Wrong-Belief and Darkness; and though they glare at me with the daylight faces of bullying opponents, and their voices are the voices that often shout me down in argument, yet, in these nocturnal controversies, it is always my assertions that admit no answer. ”

“ By the exhibition of folly and vice, in the persons of the actors and actresses, who are held up to ridicule and censure, a moral effect is produced on the audience, who retire from such a scene, where the absurdities of the human character have been exhibited to their view, infinitely more disgusted by them, than they ever felt when listening to the grave lecture of censure or condemnation from the pulpit. ”

“ Do you not offer them a mortal insult by presenting to them such nonsense as argument? And if your constituents were capable of suffering themselves to be deceived by such unspeakable absurdities, or to accept the insult without resentment, would such an attempt at deception under any circumstances be the part of an honest man? Is there really no blush rising to your cheeks when you look at your performance?
These are the three falsehoods which, when writing my last letter, I selected for exposure from a larger number. ”

“ Thus he who hates fables answers one with another, and can rejoice in them when they flatter his envy. He appears at the head of his squadron of critics, in the full spirit of one utterly devoted to a party; with whom truth is a lie, or as bad as a lie, when it makes against him ”

“ The villains in the Penny Awfuls are imaginary creatures; they live only in the brains of the cheap novelist; to vilify them, to defame them, can hurt the feelings, can do injury, to no living being. But the villain your Reporter has depicted in his Romance of Real Life is a man who lived, who was honoured, and who had at least one firm and true friend in the person of him who is now tracing these lines. To defame and vilify the dead is an act of the grossest injustice, and of this injustice your Reporter is guilty. ”

“ And in depicting this type of character writers have invariably felt it their bounden duty to give full prominence to this fateful gift of swearing. With much discretion the novelist has in the present instance invented a subterfuge, which, while it does not rob Mr. Barley of his idiosyncrasies of speech, leaves an amused and not an offensive impression behind it. We are, in fact, called in to assist at a very quiet piece of human contradiction. ”

“ The Fastnachtspiele are probably to be traced, not so much to the Feast of Fools proper, as to the spring sword-dances in which, as we have seen, a Narr or ‘fool’ is de rigueur. They share, however, with the sotties their fundamental idea of the universal domination of folly. ”

“ Thus will the changeableness of men be demonstrated at the same time as their egoism. These puppets are monsters and these monsters puppets: my audience will not need to be told that ‘Il faut se hâter d’en rire de peur d’être obligé d’en pleurer.’”
So cruel a farce had never been seen. The public was accustomed in farces to two or three comic characters, to satire at the expense of two or three ridiculous types. Here was a caricature of all mankind. ”

“ All classes, all callings, are sportively viewed on the weak side. But in relation to the author's own life and times, the most important topics are the various abuses in the Church, the pedantries of the school-men, and the selfish wars of kings. If this eloquent Folly, as Erasmus presents her, most often wears the mocking smile of Lucian or Voltaire, there are moments also when she wields the terrible lash of Juvenal or of Swift. The popularity of the satire, throughout Europe, was boundless. ”

“ A person is said to be FLASH when he apes the appearance or manners of his betters, or when he is trying to be superior to his friends and relations. Flash also means “fast,” roguish, and sometimes infers counterfeit or deceptive,—and this, perhaps, is its general signification. “Flash, my young friend, or slang, as others call it, is the classical language of the Holy Land; in other words, St. Giles’ Greek.”—Tom and Jerry, by Moncreiff. Vulgar language was first termed FLASH in the year 1718, by Hitchin, author of “The Regulator of Thieves, &c., with account of FLASH words.” ”

“ There is an indulgence of spleen, a silly gossiping espionage, which delights in prying into the faults of others, without any motive but that of the gratification of its own mean nature—but there is an investigation into the habits and manners of the actors in the scene of fashionable folly, which, by dispelling the illusion, may preserve others from being heedlessly [34] drawn into the vortex of so dangerous a career. ”

“ Sir Thomas Hammer reads, folly shewn. [The sense is, But wise men's folly, when it is once fallen into extravagance, overpowers their discretion. Revisal.] I explain it thus. The folly which he shows with proper adaptation to persons and times, is fit, has its propriety, and therefore produces no censure; but the folly of wise men when it falls or happens, taints their wit, destroys the reputation of their judgment. ”

“ Those that design to do ill support themselves by falsehood and lying: A wicked doer gives ear, with a great deal of pleasure, to false lips, that will justify him in the ill he does, to those that aim to make public disturbances, catch greedily at libels, and false stories, that defame the government and the administration. 2. Those that take the liberty to tell lies take a pleasure in hearing them told: A liar gives heed to a malicious backbiting tongue, that he may have something to graft his lies upon, and with which to give them some colour of truth and so to support them. ”

“ What, if she could think how fearful is my interest in these outrages, that in all probability, if their authors are detected, there is one who will drag me into their ruin; that I am given over, bound and blinded, into the hands of another; and that other, a man steeled to mercy, and withheld from my destruction by a thread—a thread that a blow on himself would snap. ”

“ When freedom of speech became vulgar (that is, popular or general) , the Fool, as such, began to disappear. The term is sometimes applied in a singular sense. Thus “Fools’ Pence” was the name given to a tax once levied on the astrologers of Alexandria, because of the gain of their own ingenious folly derived from fools.
It is to be observed too that people themselves have been as sovereigns who possessed their witty fools to teach them lessons of wisdom. ”

“ Since I have lived in America I have become familiar with a word which is very similar—a bluffer. But a bluffer is a conscious liar and may be a humorist, whereas a spuffler does all in his power to deceive himself and is always in dead earnest. ”

“ Blackstone says, that "if a person publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity;" and Lord Chief Baron Comyns defines libel as "a contumely, or reproach, published to the defamation of the Government, of a magistrate, or of a private person."—Now, I beseech you to consider the words, mischievous, improper, illegal, contumely, reproach, or defamation. ”

“ Every one took up the letter, every one examined it, read the obnoxious sentence over and over again, and when they were all perfectly convinced, that this abominable libel upon their much adored master existed, there arose a tumultuous uproar, during which, every person endeavoured to vent his anger, by uttering the most contradictory imprecations, mingled with the most pathetic exclamations. ”