A clown or buffoon (after the Harlequin character in the commedia dell'arte)

Usage examples of harlequin.

Gollancz has published his eighth story collection, The Coming of Vertumnus, and Boxtree has published Harlequin.

After I had examined the Pantaloons, Punches, Harlequins, and Merry Andrews, I went near the grating, where I saw all the nuns and boarders, some seated, some standing, and, without appearing to, notice any of them in particular, I remarked my two friends together, and very intent upon the dancers.

The clothes looked more like fancy-dress costumes than anything one could wear day to day: court jester crossed with harlequin crossed with Peter Pan, rainbow colours, zig-zag hems, Kate Greenaway layers of flowing fabrics, ballet tights and operatic coats for flower children.

He behaved like one frantic, and made almost as many mistakes while he was dressing Jones as I have seen made by Harlequin in dressing himself on the stage.

At present, neither Talboy nor The Harlequin were conscious of the new arrival from the second floor: Steve Kilroy At a turn on a small landing, Steve had just reached the right position for a long lunge down the last half dozen steps, when things happened very fast.

Whipping from the road, The Harlequin piloted his borrowed car in between a pair of pillars and along a curving drive which reminded Steve Kilroy of two previous places combined.

Steve Kilroy and The Harlequin, who were breaking apart at the top of the stairs.

Margo Lane could only hope that Steve Kilroy would fare better when he met The Harlequin than Margo herself had fared while trying to trace the absent killer!

The quadrille lasted one hour, and I took no part in it, but immediately after it, a Harlequin approached me with the impertinence which belongs to his costume, and flogged me with his wand.

Here and there that woods harlequin, the madrone, permitting itself to be caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder-red, breathed its fragrance into the air from great clusters of waxen bells.

In the living room the walls are covered with paintings, the best of the current crop, and the mantel, coffee table, Directoire Palissandre table, Louis XVI Harlequin table and built-in shelves between the windows are covered with sculpture: a tiny gold wire horse, little greened-copper figures, things that look like icicles and sand castles of brass.

The Donne Furlane was the piece, a comedy of art as they call it here-- or, as we say, a comedy of masks--wherein the stock characters of Harlequin, Columbine, Brighella and Pantalone are given a rag of a plot, and are expected to embroider that with follies, drolleries and obscenities according as their humour of the moment may dictate.

To please the actors, and especially my mother, I wrote a kind of melodrama, in which I brought out two harlequins.

Carlin Bertinazzi who played Harlequin, and was a great favourite of the Parisians, reminded me that he had already seen me thirteen years before in Padua, at the time of his return from St.

I liked, while her father and mother only laughed, and the silly Harlequin fretted and fumed at not being able to take the same liberties with his Dulcinea.