This is the mind in which Don Juan interprets the universe, and paints the still living court of Florizel and his buffoons.

Or that he went about Italy at the head of pimps and prostitutes and buffoons, women as well as men, in company with the lictors bearing festoons of laurel?

Dwarfs have also fascinatedwitness the short-limbed satyrs of the Greeks and the dwarf gods (Ptah and Bes) of Egypt, as well as the vogue of the court dwarf-buffoons, of whom Velasquez has left us some portraits.

He never could sport with jesters, or laugh with buffoons, or chat with fools; and because of this he seemed to be haughty and disdainful.

Thus ministers have royal boons Conferred on blockheads and buffoons: In spite of nature, merit, wit, Their friends for every post were fit.

He was a Tiberius, but not a Nero fiddling over national calamities, and surrounding himself with stage-players, buffoons, and idiots.

The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the State.

One stern voice was raised in reprobation, that of Samuel Johnson: he, at all events, had a due horror of buffoons; but even he owned himself vanquished.

The preoccupations here behind the lines filled him with disgust, weariness, and a profound pity for these people in the reara strange race to him, with the outcries of the papers, questions from such personsold buffoons, worn-out, damaged politicians!patriotic braggings, written-up strategies, anxieties about black bread, sugar cards, or the days when the confectioners were shut.

The bad repute into which jugglers had fallen did not prevent the kings of France from attaching buffoons, or fools, as they were generally called, to their households, who were often more or less deformed dwarfs, and who, to all intents and purposes, were jugglers.

These buffoons or fools were an institution at court until the time of Louis XIV., and several, such as Caillette, Triboulet, and Brusquet, are better known in history than many of the statesmen and soldiers who were their contemporaries.

As there are many eminent Criticks who never writ a good Line, there are many admirable Buffoons that animadvert upon every single Defect in another, without ever discovering the least Beauty of their own.

"In the centre of the square was an assemblage of everything in the world; theatres, wild beasts, lusus naturoe, mountebanks, buffoons, dancers on the slack wire, fighting and swearing, pocket-picking and stealing, music and dancing, and hubbub and confusion in every confused shape.

Contiguous to the theatres are the exhibition rooms of the jugglers and buffoons, who also between their exhibitions display their tricks on stages before the populace, and show as many antics as so many monkeys.

I tell you, O conscript fathers, that a lot of buffoons and actresses have been settled in the district of Campania.

As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window a bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes.

Leo delighted in the society of clever people, poetasters, petty scholars, lutists, and buffoons.

Perhaps the effects even of Shakspeare's poetry might have been yet greater, had he not counteracted himself; and we might have been more interested in the distresses of his heroes, had we not been so frequently diverted by the jokes of his buffoons.

When the late King, your father of glorious memory, did me the honour of conferring with me upon state affairs, he was in the habit of previously clearing the apartment of all buffoons and mountebanks."

It is a criminal Humility in a Person of your Holiness's Understanding, to believe you cannot excel but in the Conversation of Half-wits, Humorists, Coxcombs, and Buffoons.

It was also an object with him, that the clowns or buffoons should not occupy a more important place than that which he had assigned them: he expressly condemns the extemporizing with which they loved to enlarge their parts.

Scarcely any of the latter that ever I knew but, if they had parts, were buffoons.

French ballet-dancers, French cooks, horse-jockeys, buffoons, procuresses, tailors, boxers, fencing-masters, china, jewel and gimcrack-merchantsthese were his real companions.

In the uncivilised North they remained buffoons; but in the South, where the greater refinement of life demanded more artistic performance, the musical part of their entertainment became predominant and the joculator became the joglar (Northern French, jongleur), a wandering musician and eventually a troubadour, a composer of his own poems.

Life in the eyes of these mournful buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as a grinning mask.