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More "Lear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... childhood's days I took delight In LEAR'S immortal Dong, Whose nose was luminously bright, Who sang a silvery song. He did not terrify the birds With strange and unpropitious words Of double-edged ontong; I'm ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... Whatever form his verse takes,—sonnet, song, or dramatic poetry,—it shows the touch of the master hand, the inspiration of the master mind. Of his plays those which are still most frequently acted are the tragedies "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "King Lear," and "Othello," the comedies "Midsummer-night's Dream," "The Merchant of Venice," "As You Like It," and "The Comedy of Errors," and the historical plays "Julius Caesar," "King Henry IV," "King Henry ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... The Tortoise and the Geese; The Lark and her Young Ones, in Scudder, Book of Fables and Folk-Stories; The Monk and the Bird, in Scudder, Book of legends; The Owl and his School, in Ramaswami Raju, Indian Fables; The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, Lear (poem), in Story-Telling Poems; The Partridge and the Crow, in Dutton, The Tortoise and the Geese; The Pious Robin, in Brown, Curious Book of Birds; The Rustic and the Nightingale, in Dutton, The Tortoise and the Geese; The Sparrows, Thaxter (poem), in Story-Telling Poems; The ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... where all the attention may be directed to some great master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in KING LEAR, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour of KING LEAR against the OEDIPUS TYRANNUS or the AGAMEMNON, or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... yet only early afternoon; and the wind howled dismally over the hills of the heath—not improbably the same heath which had witnessed the agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear. Gertrude Lodge talked most, Rhoda replying with monosyllabic preoccupation. She had a strange dislike to walking on the side of her companion where hung the afflicted arm, moving round to the other when inadvertently near it. Much heather had been brushed by their feet when ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... fortnight, until he was able to settle down comfortably in lodgings, in Dove Court, Mansion House. He was soon hard at work upon 'The Death of Rizzio,' adorning his walls with pictures he had brought with him or sent for afterwards from Kendal, such as 'King Lear,' 'Elfrida,' 'The Death of Lefevre,' and a few portraits of friends. The Rizzio picture has been represented as 'a work of extraordinary merit, combining energetic action with strong expression.' Its fate was sad enough; attracting no notice, producing no ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... enough to puzzle a Celtic scholar, and more than enough to puzzle Lord Macaulay, who, like the still more ignorant Doctor Samuel Johnson, knew nothing of the venerable language of the first inhabitants of the British Isles, and of all Western Europe, resolve themselves into Li! Li Beur! Lear-a! Buille na la, which signify, "Light! Light! on the sea, beyond the promontory! 'Tis the stroke (or dawn) of the day!" Like all the choruses previously cited, these words are part of a hymn to the sun, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... in the plays of Shakspeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet's ruling passion? Or Othello's? Or Harry the Fifth's? Or Wolsey's? Or Lear's? Or Shylock's? Or Benedick's? Or Macbeth's? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example-Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money? Or so bent on both together ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Discoveries in Hieroglyphics and other Antiquities, 6 vols. 8vo. Lond. 1813,—which was suppressed by the author after a few copies had been sold. I have the second and third volumes, being all that relates to Shakspeare. They consist of an edition of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and the third satire of Horace, copiously illustrated with notes and woodcuts, intended to prove that in the works in question, in common with "all the classics and the different specimens of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... equally impossible to deal with the fiercer passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity, his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter, his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would startle the group ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... Mirabel's table, by premature inebriation. A carriage was called for him: the hospitable door was shut upon him. Often and sadly did he speak to his friends at the Kitchen of his resemblance to King Lear in the plee—of his having a thankless choild, bedad—of his being a pore worn-out lonely old man, dthriven to dthrinking by ingratitude, and seeking to dthrown his ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bloody hand; Thou perjured, and thou simular man of virtue, Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. — Lear. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... sometimes succeeding only in proving their second. But whatever else the thing was, it was English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday: he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon, improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... us. In order to illustrate the situation baldly, and at the same time to put it dramatically, it may be well to take an instance concerning which we have no personal feeling. The tragedy of King Lear has been selected, although we have been accustomed so long to give him our sympathy as the victim of the ingratitude of his two older daughters, and of the apparent coldness of Cordelia, that we have not sufficiently considered the weakness of his fatherhood, revealed by the fact that he ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... read from childhood, in a fragmentary way. "The Tempest," and "Midsummer Night's Dream," and "King Lear," I had swallowed among my fairy tales. Now I discovered that the historical plays, notably, "Julius Caesar" and "Coriolanus," had no less attraction for me, though of a different kind. But it was easy for me to forget that I was trying to be a literary student, and slip off ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... Charles Lamb and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the work was originally produced it had illustrations to which Lamb objected. His reference to tail-pieces ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... likely to charm the reader by its freshness and originality. But one point, we must confess, is not new, and that is the representation of Shakespeare as a lawyer. The supposition, that the author of "Macbeth," "Hamlet," and "King Lear," was a bustling young attorney, is of respectable age, and has years enough upon its beard, if not discretion. It has been brought forward afresh by two members of the profession for which is claimed the honor of having Shakespeare's name upon its roll,—William ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings will never mark it. Think'st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling the hour in Caesar's Rome, buried that Roman 'stead o' burning him and gave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... Beauclerc, were to come down to Clarendon Park, and Beauclerc was very happy teaching the merlins to sit on Lady Cecilia's and on Miss Stanley's wrist. Helen's voice was found to be peculiarly agreeable to the hawk, who, as Beauclerc observed, loved, like Lear, that excellent thing in woman, a voice ever soft, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... me. Don't tell Charles or any creature! Oh! let me entreat you to be careful, for Bess does not dread him now as much as I do. Again, let me request you to write, as B.'s behavior may silence my fears. You will soon hear from me again. Fanny carried many things to Lear's, brush-maker in the Strand, next door to the ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate Iago and Shylock with the visible presence of Kean, he ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Hermitage at St. Petersburgh; and I remember well that this engraving by Sharp was one of the few ornaments in the drawing-room of Macaulay when I last saw him, shortly before his lamented death. Next to the Doctors of the Church is his LEAR IN THE STORM, after the picture by West, now in the Boston Athenaeum, and his SORTIE FROM GIBRALTAR, after the picture by Trumbull, also in the Boston Athenaeum. Thus, through at least two of his masterpieces whose originals are among us, is our ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... tottered, muttered, mumbled he, till he died, perhaps found rest. "Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?" O Lear, That a reason out of nature must turn ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... tempest, the words of King Lear unavoidably present themselves, and might, with little ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the soul of Gaul. For the converse task, to-day not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of presenting England to the French intelligence—or, indeed, to any other alien intelligence—you may choose the play "King Lear." ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... There was a mixture of novelty, of joy, of patriotic enthusiasm, felt by every heart. A committee of twelve was appointed in town-meeting to superintend the reception. The president left his carriage at Greenland, at the residence of Colonel Tobias Lear, and mounted his favorite white horse; he was there met by Colonel Wentworth's troop, and on Portsmouth plains the president was saluted by Major General Cilly, and other officers in attendance. From the west end of the State House, on both sides of Congress Street, and into Middle Street, the ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... the lips in misery; heart-stricken, heart-broken, heart-scalded; broken-hearted; in despair &c 859. Phr. the iron entered into our soul; haeret lateri lethalis arundo [Lat.] [Vergil]; one's heart bleeding; down, thou climbing sorrow [Lear]; mirth cannot move a soul in agony [Love's Labor's Lost]; nessun maggior dolere che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria [It]; sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things [Tennyson]; the Niobe of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to tally greatest bards, To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate at will, Homer with all his wars and warriors—Hector, Achilles, Ajax, Or Shakspere's woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello—Tennyson's fair ladies, Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme, delight of singers; These, these, O sea, all these I'd gladly barter, Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer, Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... he promised in return to furnish them with a play every year, if his health would permit. Two years passed, however, before he produced the Mourning Bride, a play which, paltry as it is when compared, we do not say, with Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands very high among the tragedies of the age in which it was written. To find anything so good we must go twelve years back to Venice Preserved, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Lear." For "loving like salt," see the parallels collected by Cosquin, i. 288. The whole story is a version of the numerous class of Cinderella stories, the particular variety being the Catskin sub-species analogous to Perrault's Peau ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early 'dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See {tube}, {tty}; compare {dumb terminal}, {smart terminal}. See "{TV Typewriters}" (appendix A) for an interesting true story about a ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... the greater part of the Middle Ages. Among these historians are William of Malmesbury, who belonged properly to the twelfth century; Geoffrey of Monmouth, who preserved for us the stories of Arthur, of Lear, and Cymbeline; Gerald de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis; Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk, of St. Albans; Henry of Huntingdon; Gervase of Tilbury; ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... them. But we have room now for only one of those priceless sentences in which he has set the diamond and the pearl as they were never set before. No kingly diadem can boast such jewels as glow along these lines from "Lear":— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... persuasion, to join the rest of the party at dinner. In the evening, all (Fairthorn excepted) draw round the fire. Waife is entreated by George to read a scene or two out of Shakespeare. He selects the latter portion of "King Lear." Darrell, who never was a playgoer, and who, to his shame be it said, had looked very little into Shakespeare since he left college, was wonderstruck. He himself read beautifully—all great orators, I suppose, do; but his talent was not mimetic—not ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a mischief, and keeps a lear eye still, for fear it should escape him. A man that sees a great deal more in every thing than is to be seen, and yet he thinks he sees nothing: his own eye stands in his light. He is a fellow commonly guilty of some weaknesses, which he might conceal if he were careless:—now his ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... Cecily, as he paused for a moment, "I see that it would take too long. You must deal with so many prejudices—such, for example, as that which supposes 'King Lear' and 'Othello' ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... aroused. The themes of great tragedy are built largely on this theme of insistent selfhood. Any obstruction of the self-integrity one has set one's self may provoke a violent reaction. It may be interference with one's love, as in the case of Medea or Othello, the pain of ingratitude as in Lear, the conflict between "the lower and the higher self," as in the case of Macbeth's loyalty and his ambition. These are the staple materials of drama. In common experience, an insult to one's wife or friend, an obstacle placed in the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Junction City, Kansas, has written a series of short stories on the property rights of women in Kansas, a subject that was and is, still, of vital importance to the women of the state. "The Legal Status of Mrs. O'Rourke" and "King Lear in Kansas" are ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... King Lear. Apple, balm, burdock, cork, corn, crab, fumiter, hemlock, harlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, darnel, flax, hawthorn, lily, marjoram, oak, oats, peascod, rosemary, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... the world in thin disguise much of his own life-story? Shakespeare alone, of men of genius of the first rank, seems to have learned comparatively few of his lessons in the school of suffering. But, possibly, if more were known of Shakespeare, it would be found that Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet are but the expressions of lessons learned ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... which I had aimed at giving it an air of distinction had already been compared by one of my teachers to Persian hieroglyphics. In this composition I had constructed a drama in which I had drawn largely upon Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and Goethe's Gotz van Berlichingen. The plot was really based on a modification of Hamlet, the difference consisting in the fact that my hero is so completely carried away by the appearance of the ghost ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... frantic for the loss of her son—then look at Lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters: why it is the west wind bowing those aspen tops that wave before our window, compared to the tropic hurricane, when forests crash and burn, and mountains ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... at one of the plays, beyond the names of them, which shows that Saintsbury was right, and I do care more for life than for poetry. No - I take it back. Do you know one of the tragedies - a Bible tragedy too - DAVID - was written in his third period - much about the same time as Lear? The comedy, APRIL RAIN, is also a late work. BECKETT is a fine ranting piece, like RICHARD II., but very fine for the stage. Irving is to play it this autumn when I'm in town; the part rather suits him - but who is to play Henry - ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... speaking in an accent much broader than the provincial dialect—"na, my faither was owre puir for giein me ony buke lear." This seemed to satisfy the damsel, and she intrusted him with the letter in its unclosed state, only enjoining him to show it to nobody, and give it into ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... reverend form With tattered robe and forehead bare, That challenge all the torments of the air, Goes by! And the pent feelings choke in one long sigh, While, as the mimic thunder rolls, you hear The noble wreck of Lear Reproach like things of life the ancient skies, And commune with the storm! Lo! next a dim and silent chamber, where Wrapt in glad dreams, in which, perchance, the Moor Tells his strange story o'er, The gentle Desdemona chastely lies, Unconscious of the loving murderer ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... encountered in books. The artistic uses of contrast as background and accompaniment, are well known to nature and the poets. Joy is continually worked on sorrow, sorrow on joy; riot is framed in peace, peace in riot. Lear and the Fool always go together. Trafalgar is being fought while Napoleon is sitting on horseback watching the Austrian army laying down its arms at Ulm. In Hood's poem, it is when looking on the released schoolboys at ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... a double chin. She received me with her lips pursed up, and her eyes on the ground, and she was insolent enough to say that she would pray for me. I am not a furious old man with a long white beard, and I don't curse my daughter and rush out into a thunderstorm afterward—but I know what King Lear felt, and I have struggled with hysterics just as he did. With your wonderful insight into human nature, I am sure you will sympathize with and forgive me. Mr. Penrose, as my daughter tells me, behaved in the most ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... was to get there; how easy to get home again. Moreover, though going to sea in the Shannon was not quite the same 'as going to sea in a sieve,' our stay-at-home friends were of the same mind as those of the dear little Jumblies, whom Mr. Lear has made immortal in his New Book of Nonsense; and we were bound to come back as soon as possible, and not 'in twenty years or more,' if we wished ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... to the maid: "Who then is this Mam'selle Wieck? I know two Fraeulein Wieck only; they are my two little daughters here. I know no other!" As Litzmann says: "With so shrill a dissonance ended Clara's stay at Leipzig." He compares this exile of the daughter by the father to the story of King Lear and Cordelia. But it was the blind and tyrannical old Lear of the first act, driving from his home his most loving child. On October 3d, Clara went back to Berlin to her mother. Her father moved heaven and earth to make Clara suspect Schumann's fidelity, and he gave the love affair ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... of the forest as it is borne down from the mountains and carried seaward, to gladden, it may be, the heart of some hard-worked, broken-spirited sailor, who, in a passing ship, sees from aloft this fair, fair island with its smiling green of lear, and soft, heaving valleys, above the long lines of curving beach, showing white and bright in the morning sun! And, as you walk, the surf upon the reef for ever calls and calk; sometimes loudly with a deep, resonant boom, but mostly with a soft, faint murmur like the low-breathed sigh of ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... their last duty to the Court and come All fresh and fragrant, to the drawing-room; In hues as gay, and odours as divine, As the fair fields they sold to look so fine. "That's velvet for a king!" the flatterer swears 'Tis true, for ten days hence 'twill be King Lear's. Our Court may justly to our stage give rules, That helps it both to fools-coats and to fools. And why not players strut in courtiers' clothes? For these are actors too, as well as those: Wants reach all states; they beg but better drest, And all ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... admired for writing his plays, than Garrick for acting them. I think him a very good and very various player—but several have pleased me more, though I allow not in so many parts. Quin in Falstaff, was as excellent as Garrick in Lear. Old Johnson far more natural in every thing he attempted. Mrs. Porter and your Dumesnil surpassed him in passionate tragedy; Cibber and O'Brien were what Garrick could never reach, coxcombs, and men of fashion.(778) Mrs. Clive is at least as perfect in low comedy—and Yet to me, Ranger ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... string,—while a harp and three flutes carry the burden of the accompaniment gracefully); a pleasant "Reverie" for string orchestra, harp, and organ; and two impromptus for string orchestra, a "Meditation" representing Cordelia brooding tenderly over the slumbering King Lear,—art ministering very tenderly to the mood,—and a cleverly woven ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... people died of hunger in the very streets of the town, and for the space of seven months there was no rain. We know at any rate that Romeo and Juliet was brought out at Dresden in 1613, along with Hamlet and King Lear, and it was surely to none other than Willie Hughes that in 1615 the death-mask of Shakespeare was brought by the hand of one of the suite of the English ambassador, pale token of the passing away of the great poet who had so dearly loved him. Indeed there would have been something peculiarly ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... me to know how hurt and distressed she was that Elizabeth should have so treated her, and as I didn't sleep any more than she did, though, owing to very different feelings about Elizabeth, I made up my mind as to some things I would say to her when she got back. And if she has never read "King Lear" I will see that she hears it read before very long with a glossary, and comments of my own on ingratitude and things of that sort. Also she may ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... open E as in mere, but this with exceptions, as heather heather, wean wain, lear lair. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enthusiastic, and wrote: "You will be very proud of 'Le Pere Goriot.' My friends insist that nothing is comparable to it, and that it is above all my other compositions."[*] Certainly the vivid portrait of old Goriot, that ignoble King Lear, who in his extraordinary passion of paternal love rouses our sympathy, in spite of his many absurdities and shortcomings, is a striking instance of Balzac's power in ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers—I said I preferred Dryden, because his couplets ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... knees. What did the flower say? Is it to hide a blush? He looks delighted; and I almost fancy I see a proud colour on his brow. As I gaze, these young people make for me a perfect idyl. The generous, ungrudging sun, the melancholy ruin, decked, like mad Lear, with the flowers and ivies of forgetfulness and grief, and between them, sweet and evanescent, human ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the Civil War as captain in the 28th Massachusetts infantry regiment. From 1867 to 1870, with John McCullough, he managed the California theatre, San Francisco. Among his many and varied parts may be mentioned Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard III., Wolsey, Benedick, Richelieu, David Garrick, Hernani, Alfred Evelyn, Lanciotto in George Henry Boker's (1823-1890) Francesca da Rimini, and James Harebell in The Man o' Airlie. He played Othello to Booth's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Ran away from the subscriber, on Sunday night, 27th inst., my NEGRO GIRL, Lear Green, about 18 years of age, black complexion, round-featured, good-looking and ordinary size; she had on and with her when she left, a tan-colored silk bonnet, a dark plaid silk dress, a light mouslin delaine, also one watered silk cape and ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... edition of Shakspeare, and remember that I formerly misrepresented your opinion of Lear. Be pleased to write the paragraph as you would have it, and send it[335]. If you have any remarks of your own upon that or any other play, I shall gladly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... drawn up to his fullest height, imposing as a new King Lear, his deep, dark eyes glowing ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... marjoram, savory, parsley, bruised with the back of a ladle, and give them two or three walms on the fire in the broth; then dish the chines in thin slices of fine French bread, broth them, and lay on them some boiled beef-marrow, boil'd in strong broth, some slic't lemon, and run all over with a lear made of beaten butter, the yolk of an egg or two, the juyce of two or three oranges, and ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... but by faith. And he too repeats that Shakespeare was a great artist, and he buys the complete works of Shakespeare and puts them on his shelves, and he goes to see the marvellous stage-effects which accompany *King Lear* or *Hamlet*, and comes back religiously convinced that Shakespeare was a great artist. All because the passionate few could not keep their admiration of Shakespeare to themselves. This is not cynicism; but truth. And it is important that ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... Edward Lear, the artist, traveling in Greece, says that "he was one day jogging along with an Albanian peasant, who said to him, 'Women are really better than donkeys for carrying burdens, but not so good as mules.'" This was the honest opinion of barbarism—the honest feeling ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... interest. He sees the like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great. It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most deeply colors the imagination. When the boy is wandering through fields, sitting ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... fancied security have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful there. In the figure of the maddened Lear we see ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Mr. Lear, my private secretary, to lay before you a copy of the adoption and ratification of the Constitution of the United States by the State of North Carolina, together with a copy of a letter from His Excellency Samuel Johnston, president of the convention of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... the buoyant influences of the Muse. Shakspeare and Plato are lighter than levity; they are lifting forces, and weigh less than nothing. The novelette of the season, or any finest and flimsiest gossamer that is fabricated in our literary looms, compares with "Lear," with "Prometheus Bound," with any supreme work, only as cobwebs and thistle-down, that are easily borne by the breeze, may compare with sparrows and thrushes, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... half-barbaric genius. He flung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it now the cynicism of Measure for Measure, now the despair of Hamlet and of Lear, now the radiant magnanimity of the Tempest, and departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... seventeenth century, which is itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass without incongruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: 'Give me "The Winter's Tale," "Daffodils that come before the swallow dare" but not "King Lear." What is "King Lear" but poor life staggering in the fog?' and the slow cadence, modulated with so great precision, sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater's 'Essays on the Renaissance:' 'It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... the channel of a letter from yourself to Mr. Lear, that M. Duplaine, Consul of France at Boston, has lately, with an armed force, seized and rescued a vessel from the officer of a court of justice, by process from which she was under arrest in his custody: and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... present work, while we have used our utmost endeavour to place in the vacant frame, the true portrait of him who was the wonder and mystery of his own age and indeed of all ages, we have never failed to remember the instructions given to us in "King Lear":— ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... Shepeherdes gaue ouer their Dogges, their Dogges deliuered and murdered, the shepe were immediat- ly deuoured: So saieth he, if ye shall ones deliuer to Philip, the king of the Macedonians your Oratours, by whose lear- nyng, knowlege and wisedome, the whole bodie of your do- minions is saued, for thei as Bandogges, doe repell all mis- cheuous enterprises and chaunses, no doubte, but that raue- nyng Wolfe Philip, will eate and consume ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... accustomed to call the most universal genius that ever existed. He has a truly wonderful variety. It is almost impossible to pronounce in which he has done best, his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Othello. He is equally excellent in his comic vein as his tragic. Falstaff is in his degree to the full as admirable and astonishing, as what he achieved that is noblest under the auspices of the graver muse. His poetry and the fruits of his imagination are unrivalled. His language, in ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... great power of wrath, inheriting the high, hasty temper of his mother. Tobias Lear, his intimate friend and private secretary, says that in the winter of 1791, an officer brought a letter telling of General St. Clair's disastrous defeat by the Indians. It must be delivered to the President himself. He left his family and guests at table, glanced ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... 'Where be ye gaun, ye broken men?' Quo' fause Sakelde; 'come tell to me!' Now Dickie of Dryhope led that band, And the nevir a word o' lear had he. ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... court a London magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen, ordered the destruction of 272 volumes of the English translation of Balzac's "Les Contes Drolatiques" on the ground that the book was obscene. "Les Contes Drolatiques" is an acknowledged masterpiece, and is not nearly so free spoken as "Lear" or "Hamlet" or "Tom Jones" or "Anthony and Cleopatra." What would be thought of a French magistrate or a German magistrate who ordered a fair translation of "Hamlet" or of "Lear" to be burnt, because of its obscenity? He would be regarded as demented. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... deepest abyss of misery, where humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages, and given up a prey to naked helplessness. The threefold dignity of a king, an old man, and a father, is dishonoured by the cruel ingratitude of his unnatural daughters; the old Lear, who out of a foolish tenderness has given away every thing, is driven out to the world a wandering beggar; the childish imbecility to which he was fast advancing changes into the wildest insanity, and when he is rescued from the disgraceful destitution to which he was abandoned, it ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... to most readers—Lamb writes very much in the manner in which Shakspeare's fools and jesters—in some respects the wisest and thoughtfullest characters in his works—talk. If his words be "light as air," they vent "truths deep as the centre." If the Fool in "Lear" had written letters to his friends and acquaintances, I think they would have marvellously resembled this epistle to Patmore; and if, in saying this, I compliment the Fool, I hope I do not derogate from the genius of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... to the fact that "all men are more gratified at catching the resemblance for themselves, than in having it pointed out to them." But after what has been said, the great economy it achieves will seem the more probable cause. Lear's exclamation— ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... find the fatality in "Hamlet," "King Lear," in "Macbeth"? Is its throne not erected in the very centre of the old king's madness, on the lowest degree of the young prince's imagination, at the very summit of the Thane's morbid cravings? Macbeth we may well pass by; not need we linger over Cordelia's ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... names. And if there is one impudent interpolation in the Bible, it is to be found in the last chapter of that ancient Book of Job. The original writer conceived a tragedy, anticipating the grandeur of the Oedipus at Colonos, or Lear—and here eight supplementary verses have anti-climaxed this masterpiece to the level of a boys' novel. "Also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before," &c., &c. Tut-tut! Job's human nature had sustained a laceration that nothing but ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... is best played; a tragedy is best read at home." He was much pleased one night with Mr. McCullough's delineation of the character of "Edgar," which the actor played in support of Edwin Forrest's "Lear." He wished to convey his approval to the young actor, and asked Mr. Brooks, his companion at the moment, with characteristic simplicity, "Do you suppose he would come to the box if we sent word?" Mr. McCullough was summoned, and, standing ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... a man "fourscore and upwards," like Lear, and like Lear, too, "mightily abused," about five feet seven, a little stooping, but still vigorous and alert; with a pleasant, fresh countenance, and the complexion of a middle-aged, plump, healthy woman, such as Rubens ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... wicked injustice of their fate, and seeing their own offspring brought up in evidence against them, through the most detestable acts, and by the basest subornation, would naturally extort from minds even of iron mould. If ever Lear's or Timon's power of malediction could be justifiably called into exercise, it would be against such a tribunal and such witnesses as they had generally ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... draw back the veil from the "bitter close of all," and to show that the hardest part of her work began when she laid down her sword, and the ending years of her life were the saddest and weariest portion. Never since the days of Lear has such a tale been told of a parent's sacrifice and of a child's ingratitude. In the royal home of the Duke of Bretagne, there was no room for her but for whose love and care he would have been a homeless fugitive. The discarded mother ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... the wonders of an isle That in that fairest lake had placed been, I could e'en Dido of her grief beguile; Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen: For sure so fair a place was never seen, Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye: It seem'd an emerald in the silver sheen Of the bright waters; or as when on high, Through clouds of fleecy white, ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... rabbits were embalmed in spices, cocks' combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a Lear. A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish of oyster-loaves ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... honored me with her friendship and confidence in the above and other ways, after surviving Colonel Lear forty years, died last December in Washington. There she had continued to live as his widow; being all this time in possession of, and as I supposed owning, these original letters. There she lived, ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... (for that would be saying little,) but a good, edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, has complimented the Philaster, which he himself describes as inferior to the Maid's Tragedy by the same writers, as but little below the noblest of Shakspeare's plays, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, &c. and consequently implying the equality, at least, of the Maid's Tragedy;—and an eminent living critic,—who in the manly wit, strong sterling sense, and robust style of his original works, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Codex Regius is an imperfect monument of a time of poetical energy in which old forms were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in the minds ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... season,—to confine rivers within their channels,—and to cause all things necessary for his people to be borne by the earth.' '(They told me I was everything. But when the rain came to wet me once, when the wind would not peace at my bidding,' says Lear, 'there I found them, there I smelt them out.)' This, in connection with the preceding anecdote, to which, in the opinion of this author, it comes properly so very near, may be classed of itself among the suggestive stories above ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Galds' best play, practically considered. The plot is simple, the handling of it direct and skilful, there is no propaganda to interfere with the characters, who are few, interesting, and admirably drawn. The contrast between the lion of Albrit (so often compared to King Lear) and the playful children is a master-stroke. Free from effectism, dealing only with inner values of the heart and morals, El abuelo can properly rank as one of the masterpieces of modern drama. Its theme is diametrically opposed to the traditional Spanish conception ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... fine as anything of a similar nature in English criticism, should have been almost unnoticed (undiscovered, except by literary friends) until the year 1818, when Lamb's works were collected and published. The grand passage on "Lear" has caused the Essay on the Shakespeare Tragedies to be well known. Less known is the Essay on Hogarth, although it is more elaborate and critical; the labor being quite necessary in this case, as the pretensions of Hogarth to the ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... reveries amorous or melancholy, the longings and demands of the soul, the indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and "Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in "Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia. Berlioz en ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... after its own shadow flung by the moonlight on the greensward, and attempted in its own playful way to attract the attention of its new master and wile him away from his mood of utter misery. Involuntarily he thought of the frenzied cry of Shakespeare's "Lear" over the ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Horsa, stallion and mare, as nicknames assumed by Jutish braves on the war-path. Sumpter, Old Fr. sommetier, from Somme, burden, was used both of a packhorse and its driver, its interpretation in King Lear being ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... wonderfully impressive, he plainly showed, that he thought, there was too much of artificial tone and measured cadence, in the declamation of the theatre. The present writer well remembers being in conversation with Dr. Johnson, near the side of the scenes, during the tragedy of King Lear: when Garrick came off the stage, he said, "You two talk so loud, you destroy all my feelings." "Prithee," replied Johnson, "do not talk of feelings, Punch has no feelings." This seems to have been his settled opinion; admirable as Garrick's imitation of nature always was, Johnson ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... am, alas! without Instruction in the art of fippling, Though something may be found about It in the works of LEAR ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... up and down the room he burst out in wild regret for the rout and disaster, and bitter invective against St. Clair, reciting how, in that very room, he had wished the unfortunate commander success and honor and had bidden him above all things beware of a surprise. [Footnote: Tobias Lear, Washington's Private Secretary as quoted by both Custis and Rush. The report of an eyewitness. See also Lodge's "Washington," p. 94. Denny, in his journal, merely mentions that he went at once to the Secretary of War's office on the evening of the 19th, and does not speak ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Friederike Roberts (1825): "Das Ungeheuerste, das Ensetzlichste, das Schaudervollste, wenn es nicht unpoetisch werden soll, kann man auch nur in dem buntscheckigen Gewaende des Laecherlichen darstellen, gleichsam versoehnend—darum hat auch Shakespeare das Graesslichste im "Lear" durch den Narren sagen lassen, darum hat auch Goethe zu dem furchtbarsten Stoffe, zum "Faust," die Puppenspielform gewaehlt, darum hat auch der noch groessere Poet (der Urpoet, sagt Friederike), naemlich ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... the children of Lir or Lear forms one of those three tales of the old Irish Bards which are known traditionally in Ireland as "The Three Sorrows of Story Telling." It has been told in verse by Aubrey de Vere ("The Foray of Queen Meave, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Beatrice says in The Cenci is beautiful and conceivable and admirable: but unless we except her exquisite last words—and even they are more beautiful than inevitable—we shall hardly find what we find in "King Lear" and "The White Devil," "Othello" and "The Duchess of Malfy"—the tone of convincing reality; the note, as a critic of our own day might call ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Shakespeare's plays that it was possible to read with any hope of attracting or interesting an audience. My father had limited his range to a few of the most frequently acted plays. I delivered the following twenty-four: King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline, King John, Richard II., two parts of Henry IV., Henry V., Richard III., Henry VIII., Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter's Tale, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,—this King Victor has something in him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an Albany, no weakling either, but ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... visages of duty, keeping yet his heart attending on himself. When a subject differed from his master, the loyal path for him to pursue was to use every available means to persuade him of his error, as Kent did to King Lear. Failing in this, let the master deal with him as he wills. In cases of this kind, it was quite a usual course for the samurai to make the last appeal to the intelligence and conscience of his lord by demonstrating ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... fancy personifies what at first blush seems to us incapable of personification. Thus at one time*1* he likens men to clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the browsing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads; while at another he addresses an old red hill of Georgia as "Thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer."*2* Like other Southern poets,*3* Lanier sometimes fails to check his imagination, and in consequence leaves his readers "bramble-tangled in a brilliant ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... de Lear's son, Calvin. He's going to succeed his venerable and pious poppy in Kensington ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... words, the difference between art and nature. It is the privilege of art to dispense with explanations and extenuations; for if it be true to itself it is sufficient in itself, and anything added to it or taken from it is an impertinence or a deformity. When we read 'Hamlet' and 'Lear,' or 'As You Like It' and 'Much Ado About Nothing,' we do not ask ourselves what Shakespeare meant by them,—why some scenes were written in verse and other scenes in prose,—for it is not of Shakespeare ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... After tea I read Daru, and copied fair a speech I had been writing for an imaginary member of the House of Peers, on the Reform Bill. John Mason called, and they sat down to a rubber, and I came to my own room and read "King Lear." ... ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... time, I read Shakspeare, in a bad translation, to be sure; but the bold descriptions, the heroic incidents, witches, and ghosts were exactly to my taste. I immediately acted Shakspeare's plays on my little puppet theatre. I saw Hamlet's ghost, and lived upon the heath with Lear. The more persons died in a play, the more interesting I thought it. At this time I wrote my first piece: it was nothing less than a tragedy, wherein, as a matter of course, everybody died. The subject of it I borrowed ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... Or as Lear I pour'd for the deep imprecation, By my daughters of kingdom and reason depriv'd: Till fir'd by loud plaudits, and self adulation, I consider'd myself as a ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... Clans doings and the principal actor in them, and no end of speculations as to his inducements and purposes to be served in taking so much trouble. For Shampuashuh people were shrewd, and did not believe, any more than King Lear, that anything could come of nothing. That he was not moved by general benevolence, poured out upon the school of the white church, was generally agreed. "What's we to him?" asked pertinently one of the old ladies; and vain efforts were made to ascertain Mr. ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... the math for the interplanetary ships? I did! Without me they would never have been built!" He turned dramatically, as though he were playing King Lear. "And what do I get for it?" He pointed an accusing finger at Arcot. "What do I get? He is called 'Earth's most brilliant physicist', and I, who did all the hard work, am referred to as 'his mathematical assistant'." He shook his head ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... the Bible suffers by a comparison with Shakespeare. They know that there is nothing within the lids of what they call "the sacred book" that can for one moment stand side by side with "Lear" or "Hamlet" or "Julius Caesar" or "Antony and Cleopatra" or with any other play written by the immortal man. They know what a poor figure the Davids and the Abrahams and the Jeremiahs and the Lots, the Jonahs, the Jobs and the Noahs ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Helmholtz goes so far as to state that the expression of sexual longing in music is identical with that of religious longing. It is quite true, again, that a soft and gentle voice seems to every normal man as to Lear "an excellent thing in woman," and that a harsh or shrill voice may seem to deaden or even destroy altogether the attraction of a beautiful face. But the voice is not usually in itself an adequate or powerful ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... all the dancers disappeared. The masquerade was over; and again, through the darkness, rose the plaintive "All's well!" And it kept ringing in my ears until it became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free. It was like the voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: "Never, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Preterite Tenses, he adopts the Part of the Verb now described, employing it in an impersonal acceptation, without a Nominative to it expressed. One or two examples will serve to exhibit the use and effect of this anomalous Tense:—Shuidh an ['o]g bhean air sgeir, is a s['u]il air an lear. Chunnaic i long a' teachd air barraibh nan tonn. Dh' aithnich i aogas a leannain, is chlisg a cridhe 'n a com. Gun mhoille gun tamh, buailear dh' fhios na traighe; agus faighear an laoch, 's a dhaoine m' a thimchioll. In English ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... having been always a heresy with him, and the deplorable length of dialogue to the small amount of action in their plays making them sadly tiresome. The first that he saw at the principal theatre was a version of Balzac's Pere Goriot. "The domestic Lear I thought at first was going to be very clever. But he was too pitiful—perhaps the Italian reality would be. He was immensely applauded, though." He afterwards saw a version of Dumas' preposterous play of Kean, in which most of the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet's ruling passion? Or Othello's? Or Harry the Fifth's? Or Wolsey's? Or Lear's? Or Shylock's? Or Benedick's? Or Macbeth's? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example—Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to define. We feel, however, that Grant's "Memoirs" have no plot, and we feel just as sure that "King Lear" has a plot. So, too, we say that "Robinson Crusoe" has little, almost no plot; that the plot is simple in "Treasure Island," and that "Les Miserables" has an intricate plot. A plot seems to demand more than a mere succession ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... which was not a live political issue in Shakespear's time, but of impartiality in judging classes, which is what one demands from a great human poet, is not that he should flatter the poor and denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same balance. Now whoever will read Lear and Measure for Measure will find stamped on his mind such an appalled sense of the danger of dressing man in a little brief authority, such a merciless stripping of the purple from the "poor, bare, forked animal" that calls itself a king and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... himself to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out. I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a succession of victories, and a great part of Europe lay helpless at his feet. Late in the summer of 55 B.C. he reached Boulogne on the coast of Gaul. Standing there, he could see the gleaming chalk cliffs of Britain, so vividly described in Shakespeare's "King Lear."[1] ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... excellence which prevails widely round it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear: such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form. Nor would the form itself have been attainable by any isolated talent. No genius can dispense ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... for the Benefit of Mr. Edward Keen, the Father of twenty Children; and that this Day the haughty George Powell hopes all the good-natur'd part of the Town will favour him, whom they Applauded in Alexander, Timon, Lear, and Orestes, with their Company this Night, when he hazards all his heroick Glory for their Approbation in the humbler Condition of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... to. But the venerable corps, with whom the contention was held, may now be considered as totally extinct. Of late the gradual diminution of these civic soldiers reminds one of the abatement of King Lear's hundred knights. The edicts of each succeeding set of magistrates have, like those of Goneril and Regan, diminished this venerable band with the similar question, "What need we five-and-twenty?—ten?—or five?" And it is now nearly come to, "What need one?" A spectre may indeed here ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the drawing-room; In hues as gay, and odours as divine, As the fair fields they sold to look so fine. "That's velvet for a king!" the flatterer swears 'Tis true, for ten days hence 'twill be King Lear's. Our Court may justly to our stage give rules, That helps it both to fools-coats and to fools. And why not players strut in courtiers' clothes? For these are actors too, as well as those: Wants reach all states; they ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... the following terms: "How little Shakspeare was once read, may be understood from Tate, who, in his dedication to the altered play of King Lear, speaks of the original as an obscure piece, recommended to his notice by a friend; and the author of the Tatler, having occasion to quote a few lines out of Macbeth, was content to receive them from Davenant's alteration ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... and Quitman, commanding brigades in General Butler's division; Lieutenant-Colonels Garland and Wilson, commanding brigades in General Twiggs' division; Colonels Mitchell, Campbell, Davis, and Wood, commanding the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and 2d Texas regiments, respectively; and Majors Lear, Allen, and Abercrombie, commanding the 3d, 4th, and 1st regiments of infantry; all of whom served under my eye, and conducted their commands with coolness and gallantry against the enemy. Colonel Mitchell, Lieutenant-Colonel McClung, Mississippi regiment, Major Lear, ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... well know that J. K. is an eminent actor, and one whom we have not niggardly praised. Yet we will not disparage departed excellence for any person existing; and therefore cannot avoid wishing our young author had seen Garrick, and bearing in his "mind's eye" his natural acting of Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard, &c.—he might then go and witness the performances of Mr. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... are now within a foot Of the extreme verge; for all beneath the moon Would I not leap upright! KING LEAR. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and what makes him worth attending to is that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience. He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... promulgated are received with wild enthusiasm. In Italy, during the most frenzied period of Garibaldian worship, my old friend, Lear the artist, asked a patriotic inn-keeper, who was in a wild state of excitement, to give him breakfast, to which the man replied: "Colazione! Che colazione! Tutto e amore e liberta!" In the Albanian village in which Miss Durham ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... not thy ardour for adventure carry thee into more such scrapes as that of the Solway Sands. The rest of the story is a mere imagination; but that stormy evening might have proved, as the clown says to Lear, 'a naughty night to ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... and went to the Park Theater. Another night we spent in Philadelphia, and went to the Chestnut Street Theater. Staples had a fondness for theaters, and on these occasions I followed his example. I had been in a theater but one, when I saw Forrest in Boston, in King Lear. At Philadelphia I bought a copy of Byron for three dollars. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... Mr. Marrapit declaimed from the window, "old as mankind; not therefore less bitter—the tragedy of ingratitude. At stupendous cost I have supported, educated, clothed you. You turn upon me for more. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! I am Lear." ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... Helen, but I have. And I have seen Orestes and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Oedipus. Do you suppose I have not met Tarquin and Virginia and Lucretia and Shylock—to come down to nearer times—and seen Lear and studied Macbeth in the flesh? I knew Juliet once, and behind locked doors I have talked with Romeo. They are all here in any American commonwealth at the close of our century: the great tragedies are numbered—the oldest are the newest. So that sometimes I fix my eyes only on the old. I see ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... passions, reveries amorous or melancholy, the longings and demands of the soul, the indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and "Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in "Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia. Berlioz en revanche was better appreciated in Germany than ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 62. Ignorance on the subject of mental disease. The exorcists. 63. John Cotta on possession. What the "learned physicion" knew. 64. What was manifest to the vulgar view. Will Sommers. "The Devil is an Ass." 65. Harsnet's "Declaration," and "King Lear." 66. The Babington conspiracy. 67. Weston, alias Edmonds. His exorcisms. Mainy. The basis of Harsnet's statements. 69. The devils in "Lear." 70. Edgar and Mainy. Mainy's loose morals. 71. The devils tempt ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... daresay set many a female heart a palpitating. When he made his first appearance, there was just such a humming and clapping of hands as you may have heard when the celebrated Garrick comes upon the stage in King Lear, or King Richard, or any other top character. But how agreeably were we disappointed, when our young gentleman made such an oration as would not have disgraced a Pitt, an Egmont, or a Murray! while he spoke, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... Booth's playing. A farce or a comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home." He was much pleased one night with Mr. McCullough's delineation of the character of "Edgar," which the actor played in support of Edwin Forrest's "Lear." He wished to convey his approval to the young actor, and asked Mr. Brooks, his companion at the moment, with characteristic simplicity, "Do you suppose he would come to the box if we sent word?" Mr. McCullough was summoned, and, standing at the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... thin disguise much of his own life-story? Shakespeare alone, of men of genius of the first rank, seems to have learned comparatively few of his lessons in the school of suffering. But, possibly, if more were known of Shakespeare, it would be found that Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet are but the expressions of lessons learned as he fought ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... 12th of December, 1799, Washington made the tour, as usual, of his plantations. The weather was very bad. There was rain, hail, and snow falling at different times, and a cold wind blowing. It was after three o'clock when he returned. Mr. Lear, his secretary, brought him some letters to be franked, for he intended to send them to the post office that afternoon. Washington franked the letters, but said that the weather was too bad to send a servant out with them. Lear noticed that the General's ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... concerts given by Berlioz at the Conservatoire, Chopin played an "Andante" for the piano with orchestral accompaniments of his own composition, which, placed as it was among the overtures to "Les Francs-Juges" and "King Lear," the "Harold" Symphony, and other works of Berlioz, no doubt sounded at the concert as strange as it looks on the programme. The "Andante" played by Chopin was of course the middle movement of one of his concertos. [Footnote: Probably the "Larghetto" from the F minor Concerto. See ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... see—a very handsome Face, inclining to round; fine wanton Eyes, with a plaguy Roguish Lear; plump, round, red Lips; not tall, nor low, and extremely well fashion'd. [Reads all this in her Tablets. —Ay, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... cannot, as it were, see the wood for the trees; there is no room for perspective, no lawns and glades for pleasure and repose, no vistas through which to view some towering hill or elevated temple; everything in that crowded space seems of the same value: he speaks with no more awe of "King Lear" than of the last Cobden prize essay; he has swallowed them both with the same ease, and got the facts safe in his pouch; but he has no time to ruminate because he must still be swallowing; nor does he seem to know ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... vice are exhibited in daily, homespun dress, and stalking abroad through the centuries, the generous and brave nobility of King Lear, Caesar, Othello, and Hamlet, will be seen in marked contrast to Shylock, Brutus, Cassius, Iago, Gloster and Macbeth. His fools and wits were philosophers, while many of his kings, queens, dukes, lords and ladies were sneaks, frauds ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... battle in their behalf and heaped them with favors. His eyes saw the depth of that resignation which gave to God the one jewel that would have atoned for the horrid sufferings of the past. If he were free! He thought of old Lear moaning ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... are only used now for cheap search-lights. 2. I will only mention some of the best. 3. I only had time to read "King Lear." 4. He only spoke to me, not to you. 5. Coons are only killed with the help of dogs. The coon only comes out in the night-time. 6. Lost, a Scotch terrier, by a gentleman, with his ears cut close. 7. Canteens were issued to the soldiers with short ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... out. I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an excellent thing to ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and as perhaps nothing else could do, such proof of a power of loving, of an amount of attendrissement, which is not less wonderful than the bodying forth of that myriad-mind which gave us Hamlet, and Lear, Cordelia, and Puck, and all the rest, and indeed explaining to us how he could give us all these;—while we hardly go so far, we agree with his other wise words:—"There is a weakness and folly in all misplaced and excessive affection;" which ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... he is a real actor—of the traditional school, of course—but great, all the same. It has always seemed to me that his Lear was one of the fine performances of the stage to-day. But even Mantell has to travel halfway across the country every season; he couldn't stay in New York—no, nor in intellectual and appreciative Boston, either. And I doubt whether a man would ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... legend, compared Hamlet humbugging his enemies and their tool, Ophelia, with Hamlet opening his real mind to himself or his Horatio the very next moment; contrasted the real madness the author has portrayed in the plays of Hamlet and Lear by the side of these extravagant imitations, to save, if possible, even dunces, and dreamers, and criticasters from being taken in by the latter; and at their next seance pitched into the doctor's pet ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... of these resolutions, a written message was received from the President, accompanying a letter from Mr. Lear, which he said, "will inform you that it had pleased Divine Providence to remove from this life our excellent fellow citizen, GEORGE WASHINGTON, by the purity of his life, and a long series of services ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... in date of composition, and in popular estimation at least among English readers, comes, 'Le Pere Goriot.' It is certainly trite to call the book a French "Lear," but the expression emphasizes the supreme artistic power that could treat the motif of one of Shakespeare's plays in a manner that never forces a disadvantageous comparison with the great tragedy. The retired vermicelli-maker is not as grand a figure ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... means to talk with entire sincerity,—I said,—always feels himself in danger of two things, namely,—an affectation of bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and actual rudeness. What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... annoyances, the squalid cares of even the greatest leaders of men and the brave outward show of their reception by the masses. And the other scene of which I thought, was the appearance of Mr. Irving on a first night in some big play, say, like "Lear." All the public know is that the actor is there, on the stage, to pronounce his kingly speech; but, before he has got there, Mr. Irving, perhaps, has had the sleepless nights which are required in thinking out the smallest details of his business; perchance, the second before he looks down ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... issued, Boydell petitioned Parliament to allow him to dispose of his gallery of paintings by a lottery. The petition was granted, and the whole collection was thus disposed of. One of the finest of these pictures, King Lear, by Sir Benjamin West, is ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... now within a foot Of the extreme verge; for all beneath the moon Would I not leap upright! KING LEAR. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... the inherent fault of stage representation, sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly! How can the profound sorrows of Hamlet be depicted by a gesticulating actor? So, to see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm in which he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... a forcible language, but it lacked the wealth of expression and the flexibility necessary to respond to the most delicate touches of the master-musicians who were to come. When Shakespeare has Lear ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... that he lives in a period of great poets may rest assured that he is a critic born—may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined the author of ‘The Returne from Parnassus’ in despising the unacademic author of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’ Among this band of great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the epic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening a necessary safety-valve ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... He flung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it now the cynicism of Measure for Measure, now the despair of Hamlet and of Lear, now the radiant magnanimity of the Tempest, and departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series of mutually ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creation of a nation's spirit; and the artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, but gave it form, and nothing but form. Nor would the form itself have been attained by any isolated talent. No genius can dispense with experience.... ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... in our brief meeting at Topeka: his voice, though low, had a thrill of power in it; his hand-clasp was firm and full of meaning; and when I looked into his blue eyes I recalled the words which the Earl of Kent said to King Lear: ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... stayed with the Southards, Mrs. Gray, Anne, Miriam and I. Anne, Miss Southard and Mr. Southard left New York City for California last week. Mr. Southard and Anne are to appear as joint stars in film productions of 'As You Like It,' 'Hamlet,' 'King Lear' and possibly other Shakespearian plays. It is their first experience in posing before the camera. Anne sent you her love. She will write you as ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... Parallels.—The beginning recalls "King Lear." For "loving like salt," see the parallels collected by Cosquin, i. 288. The whole story is a version of the numerous class of Cinderella stories, the particular variety being the Catskin sub-species analogous to Perrault's Peau d'Ane. "Catskin" ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... that the scoring throughout tends to glutinousness, like that of the pre-war Carlsbad plum; further, that a solo on the muted viola against an accompaniment of sixteen sarrusophones is only effective if the sarrusophones are prepared to roar like sucking-doves, which, as LEAR would have said, "they seldom if ever do." Still, on the whole the Variations arrided ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... his opinion in the following terms: "How little Shakspeare was once read, may be understood from Tate, who, in his dedication to the altered play of King Lear, speaks of the original as an obscure piece, recommended to his notice by a friend; and the author of the Tatler, having occasion to quote a few lines out of Macbeth, was content to receive them ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of them as a new kind of drama, as a redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... from boyhood his handwriting was beautifully neat, almost like copper-plate, in its precision and elegance, we shall understand what a task it must have been for him to keep up his correspondence. A little later he employed a young New Hampshire graduate of Harvard, Tobias Lear, who graduated in 1783, who served him as secretary until his death, and undoubtedly lightened the epistolary cares of the General. But Washington continued to carry on much of the letter-writing, ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... and publicly humiliating him by means of the solemn sentence of the judge. It may be asked, What human being is fit to exercise this awful office of acting as judge of another? Remember the words of Shakespeare in King Lear: ". . . .See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places; and . . . . which is the justice, which the thief?" Or recall what the Puritan preacher said when he saw from his window a culprit being led to the gallows: "There, but for the grace of ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... proudest used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than the poorest: dead, whom millions prayed for in vain. Driven off his throne; buffeted by rude hands; with his children in revolt; the darling of his old age killed before him untimely; our Lear hangs over her breathless lips and cries, 'Cordelia, Cordelia, stay ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dropped to the floor in front of my bookcase. From across the room a hitburner seared the door and slashed sidewise, cutting a smoking swathe across my encyclopedia from A-AUD to CAN-DAN and then came down as I squirmed aside. It took King Lear right out of Shakespeare before the beam winked out. It went off just in time to keep me from sporting a cooked stripe down ...
— Stop Look and Dig • George O. Smith
... about in its fitful gusts, and he rather liked it. In his anguish of spirit it was a pleasure to contend with the storm. The wind, the lightning, the sudden sharp claps of thunder were on his own key. He felt in the temper of old Lear. The winds might blow and ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... the Muse. Shakspeare and Plato are lighter than levity; they are lifting forces, and weigh less than nothing. The novelette of the season, or any finest and flimsiest gossamer that is fabricated in our literary looms, compares with "Lear," with "Prometheus Bound," with any supreme work, only as cobwebs and thistle-down, that are easily borne by the breeze, may compare with sparrows and thrushes, that can fly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... and are entitled to the best I can do for them; besides that, when I am on the stage I forget the world and all that is in it, and live the character I represent." "You will," said I, "make a grand Lear." "Yes," he replied, "I think I shall be able to make something out of the old king. I have been reading the tragedy for some time, but it will still take me two years to study ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... Hotspur, mark the class of characters I mean. But he fails where a ready and pliable yielding to the events and passions of life makes what may be termed a more natural personage. Accordingly I think his Macbeth, Lear, and especially his Richard, inferior in spirit and truth. In Hamlet, the natural fixed melancholy of the prince places him within Kemble's range;—yet many delicate and sudden turns of passion slip through his fingers. He is {p.155} a lordly vessel, goodly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... bield that gars the gear Is gone where glint the pawky een. And aye the stound is birkin lear Where sconnered yowies wheeped yestreen, The creeshie rax wi' skelpin' kaes Nae mair the howdie bicker whangs, Nor weanies in their wee bit claes Glour light as lammies wi' ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever affected by Hamlet or Lear as a little girl is affected by the story of poor Red Ridinghood. She knows that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that there are no wolves in England. Yet, in spite of the knowledge, she believes; she weeps; ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... Restoration. The creative impulse of a century had at length spent its force. For the first time since Wyatt and Surrey, England deserted the great themes of literature, the heroic passions of Tamburlaine and Faustus, of Lear and Othello, for the trivial round of social portraiture and didactic discourse; for Essays on Satire and on Translated Verse, for the Tea-Table of the Spectator, for dreary exercises on the Pleasures of the Imagination and the Art of Preserving Health. A new era had opened. It ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... of the Blest, whither he was brought by Thetis, whose mother's prayer had moved the Heart of Zeus, to dwell with Cadmus and Peleus, is Achilles' true home; or the isle of the heroes of all time, described by Carducci, where King Lear sits telling OEdipus of his sufferings, and Cordelia calls to Antigone, "Come, my Greek sister! We will sing of peace to our fathers." Helen and Iseult, silent and thoughtful, roam under the shade of the myrtles, while the setting sun kisses ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... but we see not him. We become part of him, feel with him, judge, behold with him; but we think of him as little as of ourselves. Do we think of Aeschylus while we wait on the silence of Cassandra,[G] or of Shakspeare, while we listen to the wailing of Lear? Not so. The power of the masters is shown by their self-annihilation. It is commensurate with the degree in which they themselves appear not in their work. The harp of the minstrel is untruly ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... interested especially by pictures from the opera and the tragedy. There were pictures from Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet, from "The Magic Flute," "The Barber of Seville," "Der Freischuetz," and from still a few more—each one always more romantic than the last. In selecting suitable colors for his heroes and heroines, Walter had the advice of the entire family, including Leentje. Usually ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... try and arrange my scattered ideas into some sort of connection and order. Mad! I clasped my aching head between my hands, and brooded on the fearful prospect looming before me, and in the words of poor King Lear, I ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... Constance, frantic for the loss of her son—then look at Lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters: why it is the west wind bowing those aspen tops that wave before our window, compared to the tropic hurricane, when forests crash and burn, and ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... every great actor and orator must be capable of instantaneous abandonment to his part, and of as instantaneous withdrawal from it,—like the elder Booth, joking one minute at a side-scene and in the next having the big tears of a realized Lear running down his cheeks. An eminent critic says,—"Genius always lights its own fire,"—and this constant double process of mind,—one of self-direction and self-control, the other of absolute abandonment ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... realiz'd, the bard shall see, And his best commentator breathe in thee. She spoke: her magic powers the actor tried; Then Hamlet moraliz'd and Richard died; The dagger gleam'd before the murderer's eye, And for old Lear each bosom heav'd sigh; Then Romeo drew the sympathetic tear, With him and Cibber Love lay bleeding here. Enchanting Cibber! from that warbling throat No more pale Sorrow pours the liquid note. Her voice suppress'd, and Garrick's genius fled, Melpomene declined her ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... dilettantism liked nothing better than those sudden leaps from society, and M. Egiste Brancadori, who kept the Marzocco, was one of those unconscious buffoons of whom he was continually in search in real life, one of those whom he called his "Thebans", in reference to King Lear. "I'll talk a word with this same learned Theban," cried the mad king, one knows not why, when he meets "poor ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... General Butler's division; Lieutenant-Colonels Garland and Wilson, commanding brigades in General Twiggs' division; Colonels Mitchell, Campbell, Davis, and Wood, commanding the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and 2d Texas regiments, respectively; and Majors Lear, Allen, and Abercrombie, commanding the 3d, 4th, and 1st regiments of infantry; all of whom served under my eye, and conducted their commands with coolness and gallantry against the enemy. Colonel Mitchell, Lieutenant-Colonel McClung, ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... simular man of virtue, Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. — Lear. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... and superior virtues they owed their happiness. There was a mixture of novelty, of joy, of patriotic enthusiasm, felt by every heart. A committee of twelve was appointed in town-meeting to superintend the reception. The president left his carriage at Greenland, at the residence of Colonel Tobias Lear, and mounted his favorite white horse; he was there met by Colonel Wentworth's troop, and on Portsmouth plains the president was saluted by Major General Cilly, and other officers in attendance. From the west end of the State ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... other Antiquities, 6 vols. 8vo. Lond. 1813,—which was suppressed by the author after a few copies had been sold. I have the second and third volumes, being all that relates to Shakspeare. They consist of an edition of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and the third satire of Horace, copiously illustrated with notes and woodcuts, intended to prove that in the works in question, in common with "all the classics and the different specimens of the arts which have come ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear, and his three Daughters, with the unfortunate Life of Edgar, Sonne and Heire to the Earl of Glocester, and his sullen and assumed Humour of Tom of Bedlam, by his Majestie's servants. First Edit. 4to. ib. 1608. 28 ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... throughout Flanders, Douay, and Tournay, the most thriving and populous portions of the Netherlands, with a swiftness, precision, and even with a jocularity which hardly seemed human. There was a kind of grim humor about the man. The woman who, according to Lear's fool, was wont to thrust her live eels into the hot paste, "rapping them o' the coxcombs with a stick and crying reproachfully, Wantons, lie down!" had the spirit of a true inquisitor. Even so dealt Titelmann with his heretics writhing on ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... which they set about converting, in some of his great plays, into a cosmos; and a sad muss, if not a ridiculous muss, they made of it. Signal examples of this are the 'rifacimenti' of the Tempest by Dryden and Davenant, the King Lear by Tate, and the Antony and Cleopatra (entitled 'All for Love, or the World ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... later reconciled when the daughter of Bodb Dearg was given to him as his wife. On her death, he married her sister, who transformed her step-children into swans.[304] Ler is the equivalent of the Brythonic Llyr, later immortalised by Shakespeare as King Lear. ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... savory, parsley, bruised with the back of a ladle, and give them two or three walms on the fire in the broth; then dish the chines in thin slices of fine French bread, broth them, and lay on them some boiled beef-marrow, boil'd in strong broth, some slic't lemon, and run all over with a lear made of beaten butter, the yolk of an egg or two, the juyce of two or three oranges, ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... other words, the difference between art and nature. It is the privilege of art to dispense with explanations and extenuations; for if it be true to itself it is sufficient in itself, and anything added to it or taken from it is an impertinence or a deformity. When we read 'Hamlet' and 'Lear,' or 'As You Like It' and 'Much Ado About Nothing,' we do not ask ourselves what Shakespeare meant by them,—why some scenes were written in verse and other scenes in prose,—for it is not of Shakespeare that we are thinking as we read, but of his characters, for whom we feel that he is no ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... an open slight, attended with displeasure at the same, the slight being put upon self, or upon some dear one, unbefittingly. The vengeance that the angry man craves is a vengeance that all shall see. "No, ye unnatural hags," cries Lear in his fury, "I will do such things,—what they shall be yet I know not, but they shall be the terror of the earth." When we are angry, we talk of "making an example" of the offender. The idea is that, as all the world has seen us slighted and set ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... said the Colonel, "in which you tried to prove that Shakespeare never wrote 'Hamlet' and 'Macbeth' and 'Lear' and all ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Coriolanus—Caesar—Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;—Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... angel ever since my blindness. She does all my writing, reads the plays and my notes to refresh my memory. She was reading King Lear this afternoon, and I was much stirred by the sad trials of the poor old king. I mentally compared my lot with his and found that the advantage is mine. He had no home, two ungrateful daughters, and, as far as I can learn, no 'shadow of a rock in a weary land.' ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... For the display of his declamatory powers, on the speech-days, he selected always the most vehement passages,—such as the speech of Zanga over the body of Alonzo, and Lear's address to the storm. On one of these public occasions, when it was arranged that he should take the part of Drances, and young Peel that of Turnus, Lord Byron suddenly changed his mind, and preferred the speech of Latinus,—fearing, it was supposed, some ridicule from ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... tender-pencill'd shadow," "crimson-circl'd star," the "hoary clematis," "creamy spray," "dry-tongued laurels". But whatever he describes is described with the same felicitous vividness. How magical is this in the verses to Edward Lear:— ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... reason that they are not constructed for one single impression, but are in reality parts of possible longer stories. They are, as it were, parts of stories not unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and A Lear of the Steppes, and lack those complete and concise artistic effects found in the short-stories, Markheim and Mumu, by the same authors. Both Ruth and the Prodigal Son are exceptionally well told, possess a splendid moral tone, and are excellent ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... There is always feud where there is not understanding. There is eternal feud between those two camps of misunderstanding, age and youth. This play, written by a young man, shows the feud from the point of view of youth. The play of King Lear shows it from the point of view of age. This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, too cold to care for beauty. The ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... ability to catch striking details and to present them vividly and interestingly. Examples: Hawthorne's "Sylph Etherege" and "Old Esther Dudley;" Poe's "The Man of the Crowd;" James' "Greville Fane" and "Sir Edmund Orme;" Stevenson's "Will o' the Mill;" Wilkins' "The Scent of the Roses" and "A Village Lear." ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... was across the drift of Lethe in the darkness, but never for long together. Once he woke uneasily with a start and saw a flash. The crash followed as in one beat, and the rain was like the rain in King Lear. He was broadly awake now. Two carriers were nestling near him. He felt fearfully for his pipe, and almost mourned for it as washed away. He found it, and turned over with a happy sigh. 'Man's airy notions!' 'as in a grave,' 'mix with earth' he hummed ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... puzzle a Celtic scholar, and more than enough to puzzle Lord Macaulay, who, like the still more ignorant Doctor Samuel Johnson, knew nothing of the venerable language of the first inhabitants of the British Isles, and of all Western Europe, resolve themselves into Li! Li Beur! Lear-a! Buille na la, which signify, "Light! Light! on the sea, beyond the promontory! 'Tis the stroke (or dawn) of the day!" Like all the choruses previously cited, these words are part of a hymn to the sun, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... mostly to William Pearce, his manager at Mount Vernon during a portion of his presidency, were bought from the heirs of Pearce by the celebrated Edward Everett and now belong to the Long Island Historical Society. These have been published. His correspondence with Tobias Lear, for many years his private secretary, are now in the collection of Thomas K. Bixby, a wealthy bibliophile of St. Louis. These also have been published. The one greatest repository of papers is the Library of Congress. Furthermore, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... no in titles nor in rank; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest. It's no in makin' muckle mair; It's no in books; it's no in lear; To make ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... which he makes to Friederike Roberts (1825): "Das Ungeheuerste, das Ensetzlichste, das Schaudervollste, wenn es nicht unpoetisch werden soll, kann man auch nur in dem buntscheckigen Gewaende des Laecherlichen darstellen, gleichsam versoehnend—darum hat auch Shakespeare das Graesslichste im "Lear" durch den Narren sagen lassen, darum hat auch Goethe zu dem furchtbarsten Stoffe, zum "Faust," die Puppenspielform gewaehlt, darum hat auch der noch groessere Poet (der Urpoet, sagt Friederike), naemlich Unser-Herrgott, allen Schreckensszenen ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... "tables, chairs, and joint stools are living, and significant things." In these passages Lamb seems to regard the comic merely as a means to an end;—"Who sees not," he asks, "that the grave-digger in Hamlet, the fool in Lear have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt; while the comic stuff in 'Venice Preserved,' and the doggrel nonsense of the cook and his poisoning associates ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sometimes uses iche as a dissyllable; vide his Poems passim. Ch'am, is I am, that is, ich am; ch'ill, is I will, ich will. See Shakespeare's King Lear, Act IV., Scene IV. What is very remarkable, and which confirms me greatly in the opinion which I here state, upon examining the first folio edition of Shakespeare, at the London Institution, I find that ch is printed, in ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... poetical ambition for new forms. Codex Regius is an imperfect monument of a time of poetical energy in which old forms were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... analogy, with the interest excited in us by similar dramas in our own language. Few, I trust, would be rash or ignorant enough to compare Schiller with Shakspeare; yet, merely as illustration, I would say that we should proceed to the perusal of Wallenstein, not from Lear or Othello, but from Richard II., or the three parts of Henry VI. We scarcely expect rapidity in an historical drama; and many prolix speeches are pardoned from characters whose names and actions have formed the most amusing tales of our early ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was always proud of the mystery that surrounded his birth—it differentiated him from the mass, and placed him as one set apart. Well might he have used the language put into the mouth of Edmund in "King Lear." In one of Leonardo's manuscripts is found an interjected prayer of thankfulness for "the divinity of my birth, and the angels that have guarded my life ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... luvit ilk ither weel, 'Twas then we twa did part; Sweet time, sad time!—twa bairns at schule, Twa bairns, and but ae heart! 'Twas then we sat on ae laigh bink, To leir ilk ither lear; And tones, and looks, and smiles were ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... feature of the forest primeval presents itself, not less striking and unfamiliar. From the dead branches of those skeleton pines and hemlocks, these rampikes, hang masses of white moss, snow-white, amid the dark verdure. An actor might wear such a beard in the play of King Lear. Acadian children wore such to imitate "grandpere," centuries ago; Cowley's trees are "Patricians," these ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... have room now for only one of those priceless sentences in which he has set the diamond and the pearl as they were never set before. No kingly diadem can boast such jewels as glow along these lines from "Lear":— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... this time are the death of Byrhtnoth, The Fight of Finsborough, and the Chronicle of King Lear and his Daughters, the last of which is the foundation of an old play, upon which Shakspeare's tragedy of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it than they do;—so much importance, that I should just as soon think of sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or picture. The marvelous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that they do not see that what they call, "principles of composition," are mere principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures and buildings;—A ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... tell the wonders of an isle That in that fairest lake had placed been, I could e'en Dido of her grief beguile; Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen: For sure so fair a place was never seen, Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye: It seem'd an emerald in the silver sheen Of the bright waters; or as when on high, Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs the ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... learning of the clerks, I must e'en put in what wisdom I have gotten for myself in my passage through the world. For I never could plough with another man's heifer—least of all with that of a college-bred Mess John. Not but what Mess John knoweth somewhat of the lear of love also among the well-favored dames of the city. Or else, by my faith, Mess ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... comforted, good madam; the great rage, You see is cured in him: and yet it is danger To make him even o'er the time he has lost. Desire him to go in: trouble him no more, Till further settling. KING LEAR. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... term, in the concrete, was duped by men who had liberty every way. He is the cat's-paw. By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further use. As the fool said of King Lear, when his daughters had turned him out of doors, "He 's a shelled peascod" ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... and sometimes succeeding only in proving their second. But whatever else the thing was, it was English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday: he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon, improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound in the Victorians than even their just and exquisite ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... thick clouds made the atmosphere dark, though it was as yet only early afternoon; and the wind howled dismally over the hills of the heath—not improbably the same heath which had witnessed the agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear. Gertrude Lodge talked most, Rhoda replying with monosyllabic preoccupation. She had a strange dislike to walking on the side of her companion where hung the afflicted arm, moving round to the other when inadvertently near it. Much heather had been brushed by their feet when they ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the work was originally produced it had illustrations to which Lamb objected. His reference to ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... of old oak. And what a bust was Liston's! The mouth and chin, with the throat under it, hung like an old bag; but the upper part of the head was as fine as possible. There was a speculation, a lookout, and even an elevation of character in it, as unlike the Liston on the stage, as Lear is to King Pippin. One might imagine Laberius to have had such ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... ordered the destruction of 272 volumes of the English translation of Balzac's "Les Contes Drolatiques" on the ground that the book was obscene. "Les Contes Drolatiques" is an acknowledged masterpiece, and is not nearly so free spoken as "Lear" or "Hamlet" or "Tom Jones" or "Anthony and Cleopatra." What would be thought of a French magistrate or a German magistrate who ordered a fair translation of "Hamlet" or of "Lear" to be burnt, because of its obscenity? He would be regarded as demented. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... went to Wimbledon at times because Saltram was there, and I went at others because he wasn't. The Pudneys, who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the storm-lashed heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the crackle of the new chintz) and the difference only made his smirches and bruises, his splendid tainted genius, the more tragic. If he wasn't barefoot in the mire he was sure to be unconventionally ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... They are individualities instead of individuals. They do not exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistent traits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informing characteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth, senility in Lear, or irresoluteness in Hamlet. A great fictitious character must be at once generic and specific; it must give concrete expression to an abstract idea; it must be an individualized representation of the typical qualities of a class. It is only figures of this ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... according to your taste or rank, in the cricket-field, or at the Opera, and you will soon find thoughts of the evening hazards and bets intrude themselves on the sermon, and that recollections of the popular melodies interfere with the psalms. Religion is thus treated like Lear, to whom his ungrateful daughters first denied one half of his stipulated attendance, and then made it a question whether they should grant him any ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... direct address to the absent as present, the inanimate as living, or the abstract as personal. It is closely allied to personification, with which it is often associated. This figure is expressive of intense emotion. The following passage from "King Lear" will serve ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... flock. I could write you a column of these emirs' names. And if there is one impudent interpolation in the Bible, it is to be found in the last chapter of that ancient Book of Job. The original writer conceived a tragedy, anticipating the grandeur of the Oedipus at Colonos, or Lear—and here eight supplementary verses have anti-climaxed this masterpiece to the level of a boys' novel. "Also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before," &c., &c. Tut-tut! Job's human nature had sustained a laceration that nothing ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Swift himself. In speaking of Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said "Humour there is in almost every scene and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies—on the deep melancholy of Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear." The greatest ironic achievements of Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist—or shall we rather ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... those at home how easy it was to get there; how easy to get home again. Moreover, though going to sea in the Shannon was not quite the same 'as going to sea in a sieve,' our stay-at-home friends were of the same mind as those of the dear little Jumblies, whom Mr. Lear has made immortal in his New Book of Nonsense; and we were bound to come back as soon as possible, and not 'in twenty years or more,' if we wished them ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... quite respectable, old-fogyfied times, remember amongst other amusements which we had as children the pictures at which we were permitted to look. There was Boydell's Shakspeare, black and ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling Fuselis! there were Lear, Oberon, Hamlet, with starting muscles, rolling eyeballs, and long pointing quivering fingers; there was little Prince Arthur (Northcote) crying, in white satin, and bidding good Hubert not put out ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lodgings, in Dove Court, Mansion House. He was soon hard at work upon 'The Death of Rizzio,' adorning his walls with pictures he had brought with him or sent for afterwards from Kendal, such as 'King Lear,' 'Elfrida,' 'The Death of Lefevre,' and a few portraits of friends. The Rizzio picture has been represented as 'a work of extraordinary merit, combining energetic action with strong expression.' Its fate was sad enough; attracting no notice, producing no profit, and at length becoming ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... had acquired the name of Saint Swithin's Chair. It was the scene of a peculiar superstition, of which Mr. Rubrick mentioned some curious particulars, which reminded Waverley of a rhyme quoted by Edgar in King Lear; and Rose was called upon to sing a little legend, in which they had been interwoven by some ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the reader by its freshness and originality. But one point, we must confess, is not new, and that is the representation of Shakespeare as a lawyer. The supposition, that the author of "Macbeth," "Hamlet," and "King Lear," was a bustling young attorney, is of respectable age, and has years enough upon its beard, if not discretion. It has been brought forward afresh by two members of the profession for which is claimed the honor of having Shakespeare's name upon its roll,—William ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... smell of the forest as it is borne down from the mountains and carried seaward, to gladden, it may be, the heart of some hard-worked, broken-spirited sailor, who, in a passing ship, sees from aloft this fair, fair island with its smiling green of lear, and soft, heaving valleys, above the long lines of curving beach, showing white and bright in the morning sun! And, as you walk, the surf upon the reef for ever calls and calk; sometimes loudly with a deep, ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... singular that these two Essays, which are as fine as anything of a similar nature in English criticism, should have been almost unnoticed (undiscovered, except by literary friends) until the year 1818, when Lamb's works were collected and published. The grand passage on "Lear" has caused the Essay on the Shakespeare Tragedies to be well known. Less known is the Essay on Hogarth, although it is more elaborate and critical; the labor being quite necessary in this case, as the pretensions of Hogarth to the grand style ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... taken out to dinner by General Washington when he was President. Madam Hancock, whose husband had been President of the Continental Congress and Governor of Massachusetts, complained to General Washington's Secretary, Mr. Lear, that that honor belonged to her. The Secretary told General Washington, the next day, what she said. The General answered that it was his privilege to give his arm to the handsomest woman in the room. Whether the reply was communicated to Mrs. Hancock, or whether she ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... his years expressly as these constitute a deduction from the unknown sum total of those which have been appointed him; and when the utmost bravery of their affection must breathe, not Serus, but CITO in cadum redeas! O royal Lear of our literature, who have spurned from your love the dearest daughter of your thought, is it only left us to say, "How friendly is Death,—Death, who restores us to free relations with the whole, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... an opportunity of seeing a little of his thought, running as an undercurrent to his nature. Clara had been singing with such sweetness of expression and pathetic emphasis, that my eyes were filled with tears of emotion. Miss Lear, a young lady friend, followed her, and sang with such a shrill voice, such unprecedented flying about among the octaves, that it shocked me through every nerve, and I trembled visibly and uttered an involuntary exclamation of impatience. ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... has contrived(a) the Atlantic Cable, but I declare that it astonishes(b) me far more to think that for his mere amusement(c), that to entertain a mere idle hour(c'), he has created(a') 'Othello' and 'Lear,' and I am more than astonished, I am awe-struck(b'), at that inexplicable elasticity of his nature which enables him, instead of turning away(d) from calamity and grief(e), or instead of merely defying(d') them, actually to make them the material of his amusement(d''), and to draw ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... may run very well in a tale, that "God will temper the winds to the shorn lamb!" but how can I expect that she will be shielded, when my naked bosom has had to brave continually the pitiless storm? Yes; I could add, with poor Lear—What is the war of elements to the pangs of disappointed affection, and the horror arising from a discovery of a breach of confidence, that snaps ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... I have a letter in my pocket from a young friend in a country company, the ladies of which have their sensibility strung up to so fine a tone that he cannot take the tragedy of King Lear for his benefit, because not one of them will play either Regan or Goneril. If their feelings are so exquisite in the country, where our wise laws treat players as vagabonds, what must they be when loaded with all the legal, tragic, and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... learned that his Ariel—otherwise Marie Moke—had forsaken him and had married Pleyel. In a wild state of frenzy he would go to Paris at once and seek revenge. He started, got as far as Nice, grew calmer, remained at Nice for a month, during which time the Overture to "King Lear" was written, then returned to Rome by the way of Genoa ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... kind. Browning told us that he did not know Landor very well, but that he saw him in the last years of his life under circumstances of a terribly pathetic kind. Landor played almost exactly the part of King Lear—though from a different reason—and got almost exactly King Lear's reward. Landor, it will be remembered, was originally a rich man. It will also be remembered that he was possessed of a very arbitrary and turbulent nature and quarrelled with many members of his ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Multiplicatio{n}, and Diuision (which yet were neuer taught by any man as farre as I do knowe) I wyll enstruct you after the treatyse of fractions. And now for this tyme fare well, and loke that you cease not to practyse that you haue lear ned. S. Syr, with moste harty mynde I thanke you, bothe for your good learnyng, {and} also your good cou{ns}el, which (god wyllyng) I ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... entered that region in which Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, and the antique Athenian stage poets are great. He would really not be great at all if it were not that he had religion enough to be aware that his religionless condition was one of despair. His towering King Lear would be only a melodrama were it not for its express admission that if there is nothing more to be said of the universe than Hamlet has to say, then 'as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the insistence on the swarthiness of Othello, or the deformity of Richard III. Shakespeare's work is much more than picturesque; but it is ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... how she bullies a poor old man, Jim. I'm worse than that Lear fellow in the play—most henpecked father you ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... have not niggardly praised. Yet we will not disparage departed excellence for any person existing; and therefore cannot avoid wishing our young author had seen Garrick, and bearing in his "mind's eye" his natural acting of Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard, &c.—he might then go and witness the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... is rounded with a sleep." The easy-going persons who reluct at the idea of a pessimistic Shakespeare should turn the pages of Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens. What we guessed as we read Hamlet and Lear grows a certainty as ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... is universal, and therefore so is his interest. He sees the like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great. It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most deeply colors the imagination. When the boy is wandering through fields, sitting in the shade of trees, or ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Brooding alone, While in a vision Lear was shown, While his just loathing Hung over men, Lo, from ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... acclamation, and the two elder ones vied with one another in attempts to set her mind at rest by undertaking everything, and promising for themselves and the children perfect regularity and harmony. Sophy, with a bluntness that King Lear would have highly disapproved, said, 'She was glad mamma was going, but she knew they should be all at sixes and sevens. She would do her best, and very bad it ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was formerly a favourite pickle; hence the "dangerous trade" of the samphire gatherer ("King Lear," act iv. sc. 6) who supplied the demand. It was sold in the streets, and one of the old London cries was "I ha' ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... own blood. It absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of thieves and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words with no pedigree like those of Lear, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Hamlet—the tragedy of an irresolute avenger. This interpretation is contradicted by the very play itself. "At Hamlet's side is the thoroughly healthy Horatio, almost a standard by which his abnormality may be measured. At Lear's side stand Cordelia and Kent, faithful and sound to the core. If the hater of mankind, Timon, had written a play about a rich man who was betrayed by his friends, he would unquestionably have portrayed even the servants as scoundrels. ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... to be printed 'bide, as if a contraction of abide. Cf. Shakespeare, Lear, iii. 4. 29: "That bide the pelting ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... in titles nor in rank; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest; It's no in makin muckle mair; It's no in books, it's no in lear, To make us truly blest; If happiness hae not her seat And centre in the breast, We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest: Nae treasures, nor pleasures, Could make us happy lang; The heart ay's the part ay That makes us right ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years' association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so easily ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... sold, Which few pence had made too dear On its blank to have enscrolled Beatrice, Lucifer, or Lear! ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... perhaps there is something in the Shakespearian width of sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate Iago and Shylock with the visible presence of Kean, he can introduce that ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... are accustomed to call the most universal genius that ever existed. He has a truly wonderful variety. It is almost impossible to pronounce in which he has done best, his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Othello. He is equally excellent in his comic vein as his tragic. Falstaff is in his degree to the full as admirable and astonishing, as what he achieved that is noblest under the auspices of the graver muse. His poetry and the fruits of his imagination are unrivalled. His language, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... my theatrical one. As a boy or young man I had seen, (reading them carefully the day beforehand,) quite all Shakspere's acting dramas, play'd wonderfully well. Even yet I cannot conceive anything finer than old Booth in "Richard Third," or "Lear," (I don't know which was best,) or Iago, (or Pescara, or Sir Giles Overreach, to go outside of Shakspere)—or Tom Hamblin in "Macbeth"—or old Clarke, either as the ghost in "Hamlet," or as Prospero in "the Tempest," with Mrs. Austin ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of, de par le Roi[Fr], in virtue of; under the auspices of, in the hands of. at one's pleasure; by a dash if the pen, by a stroke of the pen; ex mero motu[Lat]; ex cathedra[Lat: from the chair]. Phr. the gray mare the better horse; "every inch a king" [Lear]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... beauty and awe of a tempest. And all the while the worldly-wise, to whom the tempest is only a matter of the machineries of a theatre—of painted clouds, electric lights, and sheets of copper—the world-wise govern the storm as they choose and leave you in it defenceless and lonely as old Lear. To put your heart into life is the most fatal of errors; it is to give a hostage to your enemies whom you can only ransom at the price of your ruin. But what is the use of talking? To you, life will be always Alastor and Epipsychidion, and to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... striking example of this method is the 'Pere Goriot.' The general situation may be described in two words, by saying that Goriot is the modern King Lear. Mesdames de Restaud and de Nucingen are the representatives of Regan and Goneril; but the Parisian Lear is not allowed the consolation of a Cordelia; the cup of misery is measured out to him drop by drop, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... famous pictures in the world; my education and reading have been sufficiently general to possess me beforehand with a knowledge of most of the subjects to which a Painter is likely to have recourse; and, although I might be in some doubt as to the rightful fashion of the scabbard of King Lear's sword, for instance, I think I should know King Lear tolerably well, if I ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... that no two in the world carry away the same impressions from a show, there is always a norm somewhere; in literature and art, as in morality. Yes, even in man's most terrific, most potent inventions—when, for example, in "Hamlet" or in "Lear" Shakespeare seems to be breaking up the solid earth under our feet—there is always some point and standard of sanity—a Kent or an Horatio—to which all enormities and passionate errors may be referred; to which the agitated mind of the spectator settles back as upon its centre ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... trace of exaggeration in saying: Many people frequent theaters ostensibly for the purpose of understanding the great dramatists, and, leading thereto, seeing noted tragedians act Lear, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and at the end of years of attendance have no conception of these dramas as a whole. They had heard one voice among the many; but when the many voices blended, what ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... he was brought by Thetis, whose mother's prayer had moved the Heart of Zeus, to dwell with Cadmus and Peleus, is Achilles' true home; or the isle of the heroes of all time, described by Carducci, where King Lear sits telling OEdipus of his sufferings, and Cordelia calls to Antigone, "Come, my Greek sister! We will sing of peace to our fathers." Helen and Iseult, silent and thoughtful, roam under the shade of the myrtles, while the setting sun ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early 'dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See {tube}, {tty}; compare {dumb terminal}, {smart terminal}. See "{TV Typewriters}" (Appendix A) for an interesting true story ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... old lass," said Will to himself; "ye little ken that the Laird o' Gilnockie, whom ye tried to deprive of his birthright, sits afore ye; and will a' the lear 'neath that big wig tell ye that that same Laird o' Gilnockie sits here contriving a plan to run awa wi' ye? Faith, an' it's a bauld project; but the baulder the bonnier, as we say in Liddesdale. I only wish I could tak her wig and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... English ground now; of course, it is wet weather. The phenomena of the British climate have not changed much since the time when the rains "let fall their horrible pleasure" upon the head of the poor, drenched outcast, Lear. Thunder and lightning, however, which belonged to that particular war of the elements, are rare in England. The rain is quiet, fine, insinuating, constant as a lover,—not wasting its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... and abroad; and after attributing the founding of all the principal cities to some ruler of this line, the historian relates the story of King Leir, the founder of Leicester. As this monarch's life has been used by Shakespeare for one of his dramas,—the tragedy of "King Lear,"—and is familiar to all students of English literature, there is no need to outline Geoffrey of Monmouth's version of ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... overwhelmed her, and she lay insensible across his arms, her fair head hanging back, her white garments streaming in the air, her golden locks floating, her witching eyes closed, and her blue lips apart and rigid on her glistening teeth—so she lay like dead Cordelia in the arms of old Lear. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... his fancied security have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful there. In the figure of the maddened Lear we see ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... in the following terms: "How little Shakspeare was once read, may be understood from Tate, who, in his dedication to the altered play of King Lear, speaks of the original as an obscure piece, recommended to his notice by a friend; and the author of the Tatler, having occasion to quote a few lines out of Macbeth, was content to receive them from Davenant's alteration ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... moment, however, many of those difficulties still exist and may be seen all about us. In order to illustrate the situation baldly, and at the same time to put it dramatically, it may be well to take an instance concerning which we have no personal feeling. The tragedy of King Lear has been selected, although we have been accustomed so long to give him our sympathy as the victim of the ingratitude of his two older daughters, and of the apparent coldness of Cordelia, that we have not sufficiently considered the weakness of his fatherhood, revealed by the fact that he should ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... very courteous towards the worsted gentry; had he lived in our times, they might have worsted him for a libel: he says in King Lear, "A base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three suited, hundred pound, filthy, worsted ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... ta'en to makin' sangs himsel'; no 'at there was ony ill i' that, she said, gien there wasna ony ill i' the sangs themsel's; but it was jist some trifflin' like, she said, an' they luikit for better frae Donal, wi' a' his buik lear, an' his Euclid—or what ca' ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... of revenge, though the Dummy could have no knowledge of his words, he gestured with a dignity that conveyed all the meaning of Lying Bill's relation of the incident. In the expression and motion of the dramatic mute the aged uncle had the sublimity of Lear. For Vava, in a mask and an attitude, by some cryptic understanding encompassed the resignation and appeal ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... end of the north choir aisle and not far from its former magnificent shrine. The chief beauty of the Lady Chapel consists in the slender shafts of Purbeck marble that support the roof. The tryptych altarpiece is modern, also the east window in memory of Dean Lear. Opinion will be divided as to the merit of the roof decoration, but time will lend its aid in the colour scheme. In this connexion may be mentioned the means taken here as elsewhere to remove the curious "bloom," that comes in ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... female heart a palpitating. When he made his first appearance, there was just such a humming and clapping of hands as you may have heard when the celebrated Garrick comes upon the stage in King Lear, or King Richard, or any other top character. But how agreeably were we disappointed, when our young gentleman made such an oration as would not have disgraced a Pitt, an Egmont, or a Murray! while he spoke, all was hushed in admiration and ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... exclaiming, "I will trust my resolution and my good hands." With the same swift instinct, Cassius trusts to his hands when he stabs Caesar: "Speak, hands, for me!" "Let me kiss your hand," says the blind Gloster to Lear. "Let me wipe it first," replies the broken old king; "it smells of mortality." How charged is this single touch with sad meaning! How it opens our eyes to the fearful purging Lear has undergone, to learn that royalty is no defence against ingratitude and cruelty! Gloster's exclamation ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... attended with displeasure at the same, the slight being put upon self, or upon some dear one, unbefittingly. The vengeance that the angry man craves is a vengeance that all shall see. "No, ye unnatural hags," cries Lear in his fury, "I will do such things,—what they shall be yet I know not, but they shall be the terror of the earth." When we are angry, we talk of "making an example" of the offender. The idea is that, as all the world has seen us slighted and set ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... with him, and the deplorable length of dialogue to the small amount of action in their plays making them sadly tiresome. The first that he saw at the principal theatre was a version of Balzac's Pere Goriot. "The domestic Lear I thought at first was going to be very clever. But he was too pitiful—perhaps the Italian reality would be. He was immensely applauded, though." He afterwards saw a version of Dumas' preposterous play of Kean, in which most of the representatives of English actors wore red hats with steeple ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... mother's letters as they were written, omitting only the purely family matter which is of no interest to the public. Edward Lear's drawing of Luxor was printed in 'Three Generations of Englishwomen,' edited by Mrs. Ross, but the other illustrations are now reproduced for the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... more than the highest degree of perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creation of a nation's spirit; and the artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, but gave it form, and nothing but form. Nor would the form itself ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... society, and M. Egiste Brancadori, who kept the Marzocco, was one of those unconscious buffoons of whom he was continually in search in real life, one of those whom he called his "Thebans", in reference to King Lear. "I'll talk a word with this same learned Theban," cried the mad king, one knows not why, when he meets "poor ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... rest, to try and arrange my scattered ideas into some sort of connection and order. Mad! I clasped my aching head between my hands, and brooded on the fearful prospect looming before me, and in the words of poor King Lear, I prayed ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... far to justify this contention. We may be sure that Shakespeare, then at the zenith of his power, would not have stinted the measure of a work which seems to have taken more of his time than any previous play. Following closely upon "Macbeth" came "King Lear," produced at Whitehall for the Christmas festivities of 1606, and founded, like several of ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... the drift of Lethe in the darkness, but never for long together. Once he woke uneasily with a start and saw a flash. The crash followed as in one beat, and the rain was like the rain in King Lear. He was broadly awake now. Two carriers were nestling near him. He felt fearfully for his pipe, and almost mourned for it as washed away. He found it, and turned over with a happy sigh. 'Man's airy notions!' ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... the Court had considered it as being nos poma natamus. I kept our friends quiet by declining to move in a matter which was to expose us to the insult of a certain refusal. Clerk, with his usual felicity of quotation, said they should have remembered the Clown's exhortation to Lear, "Good nuncle, tarry and take ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... prince of optimists. His tragedies are a revelation of moral order. In "Lear" and "Hamlet" there is a looking forward to something better, some one is left at the end of the play to right wrong, restore society and build the state anew. The later plays, "The Tempest" and "Cymbeline," show a beautiful, placid optimism ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... Spanish Literature' may be found his touching letter to De Guzman at the Moorish court. He is, like Lear, poor and discrowned, but not like him, weak. His prelates have stirred up strife, his nobles have betrayed him. If Heaven wills, he is ready to pay generously for help. If not, says the royal philosopher, still, generosity and loyalty exalt ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... followed, were written by both Charles Lamb and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the work was originally produced it had illustrations to which Lamb objected. His reference ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan—the elderly D'Artagnan of the ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stage, in L'Allegro, for comedy, and the buskin, in Il Penseroso, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the comic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic. The poet of King Lear is named for his sweetness ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... soul to a cinder with that odious drug," said Wingfold. "'Tis true, as Edgar in King Lear says: ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of his innate force. Three things, however, had attracted me to him in our brief meeting at Topeka: his voice, though low, had a thrill of power in it; his hand-clasp was firm and full of meaning; and when I looked into his blue eyes I recalled the words which the Earl of Kent said to King Lear: ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... that stormy sky. All doom and destiny and wrath of avenging deities and days of judgment seemed concentrated in that frown of gigantic darkness. Beneath it the landscape seemed to grow livid as a corpse, and terror to fill with trembling the very trees and grasses. Oedipus and Orestes and King Lear rolled into one could hardly have accounted for that angry sky. Such a sky it must have been that carried doom to the cities of the plain. And, after all, it was only Colin and I innocently making haste ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... story of a feud greater than that of the Verona houses. There is always feud where there is not understanding. There is eternal feud between those two camps of misunderstanding, age and youth. This play, written by a young man, shows the feud from the point of view of youth. The play of King Lear shows it from the point of view of age. This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, too cold to care for beauty. The bright, beautiful creatures dash ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Burbadge) was the first of the great English tragic actors, and was the original of the greater number of Shakespeare's heroes—Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III., Romeo, Brutus, etc. Dick Tarleton, one of the privileged scapegraces of social life, was regarded by his contemporaries as the most witty of clowns and comedians. The clown was a permitted character in the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... paradoxical, the fact is that all this scenery is in the way. I have seen King Lear in Paris, at the Theatre Antoine, where it was presented with very nearly perfect scenery. When the King and the fool roamed about the heath in the third act, amid thunder and lightning, everybody was gazing at the clouds in the flies and watching for the lightning, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... this is the earliest use of the word in the modern meaning I have found. Richardson has it in both its modern meanings, "vigorous," or "sensitive in nerves, and consequently weak, diseased." Hysteria is not in the Bible, and is found once in Shakespeare; as, "Hysterica passio, down," Lear ii. 4. It was common in Sydenham's day,—i.e., Charles II. and Cromwell's time,—but he classified under hysteria many disorders no longer considered as of ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... most striking example of this method is the 'Pere Goriot.' The general situation may be described in two words, by saying that Goriot is the modern King Lear. Mesdames de Restaud and de Nucingen are the representatives of Regan and Goneril; but the Parisian Lear is not allowed the consolation of a Cordelia; the cup of misery is measured out to him drop by drop, and the bitterness ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and tones, the expression and character are always such as support vigorously the action of his group. We say vigorously; for Mr. Rothermel, in his Italian pictures, revealed an artistic nature related to humanity in its most agitated moods, as in the "Lear," and in the "Saint Agnese,"—this beautiful picture being, however, a higher conception, inasmuch as in it the spirit might find some rest in the stillness of the maiden Agnese, already saint and about to be martyr, and in the deep blue sky, on whose field linger white ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... tempest. And all the while the worldly-wise, to whom the tempest is only a matter of the machineries of a theatre—of painted clouds, electric lights, and sheets of copper—the world-wise govern the storm as they choose and leave you in it defenceless and lonely as old Lear. To put your heart into life is the most fatal of errors; it is to give a hostage to your enemies whom you can only ransom at the price of your ruin. But what is the use of talking? To you, life will be always Alastor and Epipsychidion, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... no trace of exaggeration in saying: Many people frequent theaters ostensibly for the purpose of understanding the great dramatists, and, leading thereto, seeing noted tragedians act Lear, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and at the end of years of attendance have no conception of these dramas as a whole. They had heard one voice among the many; but when the many voices blended, what all meant they can not begin to guess. What playgoer will give a valid analysis of King ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... almost like copper-plate, in its precision and elegance, we shall understand what a task it must have been for him to keep up his correspondence. A little later he employed a young New Hampshire graduate of Harvard, Tobias Lear, who graduated in 1783, who served him as secretary until his death, and undoubtedly lightened the epistolary cares of the General. But Washington continued to carry on much of the letter-writing, especially ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... iche as a dissyllable; vide his Poems passim. Ch'am, is I am, that is, ich am; ch'ill, is I will, ich will. See Shakespeare's King Lear, Act IV., Scene IV. What is very remarkable, and which confirms me greatly in the opinion which I here state, upon examining the first folio edition of Shakespeare, at the London Institution, I find that ch is printed, in one instance, with a mark of ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... doth protest too much.' I was already blushing deeply at the unwonted vehemence of my own words, although I had spoken only as I felt—the very, very truth. But his laugh and his test so increased my confusion that, in fine, that was the first and last time I ever did protest! Like Lear's Cordelia, I was tongue-tied—I had no words to assure him. Sometimes I wept to think how poor I was in resources to make him happy. Then came another annoyance—my name and fame were ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. — Lear. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... channels,—and to cause all things necessary for his people to be borne by the earth.' '(They told me I was everything. But when the rain came to wet me once, when the wind would not peace at my bidding,' says Lear, 'there I found them, there I smelt them out.)' This, in connection with the preceding anecdote, to which, in the opinion of this author, it comes properly so very near, may be classed of itself among the suggestive stories above referred to; but the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the fret of heart and soul, The loneliness and passion of King Lear; No more bewilderment and broken words Of wild despair ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... sacred lore;" This fancy realiz'd, the bard shall see, And his best commentator breathe in thee. She spoke: her magic powers the actor tried; Then Hamlet moraliz'd and Richard died; The dagger gleam'd before the murderer's eye, And for old Lear each bosom heav'd sigh; Then Romeo drew the sympathetic tear, With him and Cibber Love lay bleeding here. Enchanting Cibber! from that warbling throat No more pale Sorrow pours the liquid note. Her voice suppress'd, and Garrick's genius fled, Melpomene declined ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... delight in an utter perversion of all moral, intellectual, and religious qualities. It gluts over the monstrous deformities of nature; finds gratification in proportion to the magnitude of the crime it extolls; and sees no virtue but in vice; no sin, but in true feeling. Like poor Tom, in Lear, whom the foul fiend has possessed for many a day, it will run through ditches, through quagmires, and through bogs, to see a man stand on his head for the exact space of half an hour. Ask the reason of this raging appetite for eccentricity, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... in us by similar dramas in our own language. Few, I trust, would be rash or ignorant enough to compare Schiller with Shakspeare; yet, merely as illustration, I would say that we should proceed to the perusal of Wallenstein, not from Lear or Othello, but from Richard II., or the three parts of Henry VI. We scarcely expect rapidity in an historical drama; and many prolix speeches are pardoned from characters whose names and actions have formed the most amusing tales of our early life. On the other hand, there ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... took delight In LEAR'S immortal Dong, Whose nose was luminously bright, Who sang a silvery song. He did not terrify the birds With strange and unpropitious words Of double-edged ontong; I'm sure he hailed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... of comparing was introduced into English, both methods were often used with the same adjective; and, for a time, double comparatives and double superlatives were common; as, worser, most boldest. In "King Lear" Shakespeare uses the double comparative a dozen times.]; as, valuable, less valuable, least valuable. Most definitive and many descriptive adjectives cannot be compared, as their meaning will ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... regretful cry. "We stayed with the Southards, Mrs. Gray, Anne, Miriam and I. Anne, Miss Southard and Mr. Southard left New York City for California last week. Mr. Southard and Anne are to appear as joint stars in film productions of 'As You Like It,' 'Hamlet,' 'King Lear' and possibly other Shakespearian plays. It is their first experience in posing before the camera. Anne sent you her love. She will write you as ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... the old Puritan commentators has it: 'The tower is so deep that no pioneer can undermine it, so thick that no cannon can breach it, so high that no ladder can scale it.' 'The righteous runneth into it,' and is perched up there; and can look down like Lear from his cliff, and all the troubles that afflict the lower levels shall 'show scarce so gross as beetles' from the height where he stands, safe and high, hidden in the name of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakespeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet's ruling passion? Or Othello's? Or Harry the Fifth's? Or Wolsey's? Or Lear's? Or Shylock's? Or Benedick's? Or Macbeth's? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example—Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money? Or so bent on both together as ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... intelligence and a great beauty in her time. She was once taken out to dinner by General Washington when he was President. Madam Hancock, whose husband had been President of the Continental Congress and Governor of Massachusetts, complained to General Washington's Secretary, Mr. Lear, that that honor belonged to her. The Secretary told General Washington, the next day, what she said. The General answered that it was his privilege to give his arm to the handsomest woman in the room. Whether the reply was communicated to Mrs. Hancock, or whether she was comforted ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... short time! Wielded the sceptre of the Atheist crew. When the calamity spread far and wide— And this same city, that did then appear To outrun the rest in exultation, groaned 505 Under the vengeance of her cruel son, As Lear reproached the winds—I could almost Have quarrelled with that blameless spectacle For lingering yet an image in my mind To mock me under such a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... these in date of composition, and in popular estimation at least among English readers, comes, 'Le Pere Goriot.' It is certainly trite to call the book a French "Lear," but the expression emphasizes the supreme artistic power that could treat the motif of one of Shakespeare's plays in a manner that never forces a disadvantageous comparison with the great tragedy. The retired vermicelli-maker is not as grand a figure as the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... countries, or dwindle in numbers, or both. Dynasties and aristocracies which have disregarded the laws of nature have decreased in numbers and degenerated in stature; 'mariages de convenance' leave their enfeebling stamp on the offspring of them (King Lear). The marriage of near relations, or the marrying in and in of the same family tends constantly to weakness or idiocy in the children, sometimes assuming the form as they grow older of passionate licentiousness. The common prostitute ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Diuision (which yet were neuer taught by any man as farre as I do knowe) I wyll enstruct you after the treatyse of fractions. And now for this tyme fare well, and loke that you cease not to practyse that you haue lear ned. S. Syr, with moste harty mynde I thanke you, bothe for your good learnyng, {and} also your good cou{ns}el, which (god wyllyng) I truste ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... few meagre suggestions a vital and impressive work of art. One thinks instinctively, in seeking for some adequate parallel, of what Goethe did with the materials of the Faust legend, or of what Shakespeare did with the indications offered for 'King Lear' and 'Cymbeline' by Holinshed's chronicle-history. And the two greatest names in modern literature are suggested not only by this general fact of creative power, but also more specifically by certain characters ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... unimaginative, but that when struck with a great sorrow, or moved by a great passion, he is endowed for a moment with the poet's speech. A poetic fact, one may almost say, is just any fact at its best. Art, it is true, looks at its object through a medium, but it always seems its inmost meaning. In Lear, Othello, Hamlet, in Falstaff and Touchstone, there is a revelation of the inner truth of human life beyond the power of moral science to bestow. We do well to seek philosophy in the poets, for though they teach only by hints and parables, they nevertheless reflect the concrete truth of life, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... walk; thick clouds made the atmosphere dark, though it was as yet only early afternoon; and the wind howled dismally over the hills of the heath—not improbably the same heath which had witnessed the agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear. Gertrude Lodge talked most, Rhoda replying with monosyllabic preoccupation. She had a strange dislike to walking on the side of her companion where hung the afflicted arm, moving round to the other when inadvertently near it. Much heather had been brushed by their feet ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... ye gaun, ye broken men?" Quo fause Sakelde; "come tell to me?" Now Dickie of Dryhope led that band, And the nevir a word o lear ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... Butler's division; Lieutenant-Colonels Garland and Wilson, commanding brigades in General Twiggs' division; Colonels Mitchell, Campbell, Davis, and Wood, commanding the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and 2d Texas regiments, respectively; and Majors Lear, Allen, and Abercrombie, commanding the 3d, 4th, and 1st regiments of infantry; all of whom served under my eye, and conducted their commands with coolness and gallantry against the enemy. Colonel Mitchell, Lieutenant-Colonel McClung, Mississippi regiment, Major ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... we know it so well and feel so much with Caesar or with Lear or with Othello or with Macbeth, that we instinctively take it all for true psychology, while it after all covers just the exceptional cases ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Bodb Dearg was given to him as his wife. On her death, he married her sister, who transformed her step-children into swans.[304] Ler is the equivalent of the Brythonic Llyr, later immortalised by Shakespeare as King Lear. ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... and reading, and the culture coming of a few years' association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... not therefore less bitter—the tragedy of ingratitude. At stupendous cost I have supported, educated, clothed you. You turn upon me for more. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! I am Lear." ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... and nature. It is the privilege of art to dispense with explanations and extenuations; for if it be true to itself it is sufficient in itself, and anything added to it or taken from it is an impertinence or a deformity. When we read 'Hamlet' and 'Lear,' or 'As You Like It' and 'Much Ado About Nothing,' we do not ask ourselves what Shakespeare meant by them,—why some scenes were written in verse and other scenes in prose,—for it is not of Shakespeare that we are thinking as we read, but of his characters, for whom we feel ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... personification. Thus at one time*1* he likens men to clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the browsing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads; while at another he addresses an old red hill of Georgia as "Thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer."*2* Like other Southern poets,*3* Lanier sometimes fails to check his imagination, and in consequence leaves his readers "bramble-tangled in a brilliant maze," ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an excellent thing to take all the trouble, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... character; for we no more expect to see the true Antonio on the stage than to see the true moonlight shimmering on the trees in Belmont Park. But sometimes the play will transcend the limits of stage expression by being too purely and perfectly dramatic, as in "Lear." For not only is it, as Lamb points out,[3] impossible for the actor to give the convulsions of the father's grief, and yet preserve the dignity of the king, but the sustained intensity of passion fatigues both voice and ear when they should be most impressive and impressed. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... which Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, and the antique Athenian stage poets are great. He would really not be great at all if it were not that he had religion enough to be aware that his religionless condition was one of despair. His towering King Lear would be only a melodrama were it not for its express admission that if there is nothing more to be said of the universe than Hamlet has to say, then 'as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... or three walms on the fire in the broth; then dish the chines in thin slices of fine French bread, broth them, and lay on them some boiled beef-marrow, boil'd in strong broth, some slic't lemon, and run all over with a lear made of beaten butter, the yolk of an egg or two, the juyce of two or three oranges, and some ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... angrily exclaimed the aged and venerable King Lear, whose nasal organ exhibited signs of its having sustained a violent contusion—"I haven't closed an eye during the whole night, and now you keep me awake with your infernal jabbering. ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, "for they are old like him," there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could do justice to the agonising ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the display of his declamatory powers, on the speech-days, he selected always the most vehement passages,—such as the speech of Zanga over the body of Alonzo, and Lear's address to the storm. On one of these public occasions, when it was arranged that he should take the part of Drances, and young Peel that of Turnus, Lord Byron suddenly changed his mind, and preferred the speech of Latinus,—fearing, it was supposed, some ridicule from the inappropriate taunt ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... "fourscore and upwards," like Lear, and like Lear, too, "mightily abused," about five feet seven, a little stooping, but still vigorous and alert; with a pleasant, fresh countenance, and the complexion of a middle-aged, plump, healthy woman, such as Rubens or Gilbert Stuart would gloat over in portraiture, and love to paint ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... harns, Nae college lear had reached her, An' a' she kent aboot her job Her ain experience ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... best play, practically considered. The plot is simple, the handling of it direct and skilful, there is no propaganda to interfere with the characters, who are few, interesting, and admirably drawn. The contrast between the lion of Albrit (so often compared to King Lear) and the playful children is a master-stroke. Free from effectism, dealing only with inner values of the heart and morals, El abuelo can properly rank as one of the masterpieces of modern drama. Its theme is diametrically opposed to the traditional Spanish conception of family honor ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... There is a loud hammering against the door. I go to open the door, and all of you rush right by me." Then Mr. Irving opens the door to his murderers, and is borne back by the crowd of terrified monks. Five minutes afterwards, he has returned to life, and is rehearsing a scene from "King Lear," with Miss Ellen Terry's understudy, in as natural and unembarrassed a manner as if he had not been working ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... these more significant words are found in a letter which he wrote to Hackett, the player: "Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are 'Lear,' 'Richard III,' 'Henry ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... revising my edition of Shakspeare, and remember that I formerly misrepresented your opinion of Lear. Be pleased to write the paragraph as you would have it, and send it[335]. If you have any remarks of your own upon that or any other play, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... has been blamed by some few critical asses for the raillery of Mercutio, and the humor of the nurse, in "Romeo and Juliet;" for the fool in "Lear;" for the porter in "Macbeth;" the grave-diggers in "Hamlet," etc.; because, it is said, these bits interrupt the tragic feeling. No such thing; they enhance it to an incalculable extent; they deepen its degree, though they diminish its duration. And what is the result? ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... second term, in the concrete, was duped by men who hate liberty every way. He is the cat's-paw. By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further use. As the fool said of King Lear, when his daughters had turned him out of doors, "He's ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... skilful writers it will much import, Whence spring their scenes, from common life or Court; Whether they seek applause by smile or tear, To draw a Lying Valet, [12] or a Lear, [13] A sage, or rakish youngster wild from school, A wandering Peregrine, or plain John Bull; All persons please when Nature's voice prevails, Scottish or Irish, born in Wilts ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... a bad woman. Let people overburdened with credulity believe that she is bad," cried Doederlein, with the expression and in the tone and gesture of the royal Lear, and shook his Olympian locks. "The fact is that violence has been practised on her; she has been driven into ruin! Men have stolen the sweet love of my dearly beloved daughter through the use of vile tricks and artifices. Where ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... as to her brilliant husband. The friendship of David Garrick was also one of the most delightful features in the life of the admirable Hannah More. A letter written by Hannah on seeing him play Lear, greatly pleased him, and led to their acquaintance. Acquaintance soon ripened into a warm esteem, and produced a friendship of the most cordial—and intimate character, which lasted until death. He declared that the nine muses had ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... elder ones vied with one another in attempts to set her mind at rest by undertaking everything, and promising for themselves and the children perfect regularity and harmony. Sophy, with a bluntness that King Lear would have highly disapproved, said, 'She was glad mamma was going, but she knew they should be all at sixes and sevens. She would do her best, and very bad ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... distressed she was that Elizabeth should have so treated her, and as I didn't sleep any more than she did, though, owing to very different feelings about Elizabeth, I made up my mind as to some things I would say to her when she got back. And if she has never read "King Lear" I will see that she hears it read before very long with a glossary, and comments of my own on ingratitude and things of that sort. Also she may hear ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... Tenses, he adopts the Part of the Verb now described, employing it in an impersonal acceptation, without a Nominative to it expressed. One or two examples will serve to exhibit the use and effect of this anomalous Tense:—Shuidh an ['o]g bhean air sgeir, is a s['u]il air an lear. Chunnaic i long a' teachd air barraibh nan tonn. Dh' aithnich i aogas a leannain, is chlisg a cridhe 'n a com. Gun mhoille gun tamh, buailear dh' fhios na traighe; agus faighear an laoch, 's a dhaoine m' a thimchioll. In English thus: ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... Falstaff, all Shakespeare's characters are what we call marrying men. Mercutio, as he was own cousin to Benedick and Biron, would have come to the same end in the long run. Even Iago had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like Jacques and the Fool in LEAR, although we can hardly imagine they would ever marry, kept single out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference for the single state. For that matter, if you turn to George Sand's French version of AS YOU ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all this in "King Lear." Avarice closes the palace doors against the white-haired King. Greed pushes him into the night to wander o'er the wasted moor, an exiled king, uncrowned and uncared for. In such hours garden becomes ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... giants of the dawn of time. For mighty exceedingly were these men. At the noise of them running to battle all Ireland shook, and the illimitable Lir [Footnote: Lir was the sea-god, the Oceanns of the Celt; no doubt the same as the British Lear, the wild, white-headed old king, who had such singular daughters; two, monsters of cruelty, and one, exquisitely sweet, kind, and serene, viz.: Storm, Hurricane, and Calm.] trembled in his watery halls; the roar of their brazen chariots reverberated from the ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... drive like a Jehu, and there's no your equal in these parts with a gun or a fishing-rod. Forbye, I would rather walk ae mile on the hill wi' ye than twae, for ye gang up a brae-face like a mawkin! God! There's no a single man's trade that ye're no brawly fitted for. And then ye've a heap o' book-lear that folk learned ye away about England, though I cannot speak muckle on that, no ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... cried the Captain, throwing off his assumption of the tragic father. The Oedipus Coloneus, the Lear—the venerable victim of winter winds and men's ingratitude—was transformed in a moment into an elderly Jeremy Diddler, lined with Lord Foppington. "He shall repeat it; I will have him at your feet to-morrow. Yes, Di, my love, I pledge ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... restrained for evil or for good his half-barbaric genius. He flung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it now the cynicism of Measure for Measure, now the despair of Hamlet and of Lear, now the radiant magnanimity of the Tempest, and departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... would become of this plan depended upon the changing fortunes of the men concerned. Kosciuszko died in 1817; and as Thomas Jefferson refused to take out letters testamentary under this will, Benjamin Lincoln Lear, a trustee of the African Education Society, who intended to apply for the whole fund, was appointed administrator of it. The fund amounted to about $16,000. Later Kosciuszko Armstrong demanded of the administrator $3704 bequeathed to him by ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... Devereux's benefit is actually fixed for the Christmas holidays, when his cousin undertakes to die for positively the last time, and his uncle will play in the most natural manner conceivable, the last act of "King Lear."' In fact, this family calamity was rather a cheerful subject among Devereux's friends; and certainly Devereux had no reason to love that vicious, selfish old lunatic, Lord Athenry, who in his prodigal and heartless reign, before straw and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Shakespere's plays?... We had ever so much about Shakespere. Weren't you perfectly astonished when you found out how many other plays there were of his? I always thought there was nothing but "Hamlet," and "Romeo and Juliet," and "Macbeth," and "Richard III.," and "King Lear," and that one that Robson and Crane have—oh, ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... good madam; the great rage, You see is cured in him: and yet it is danger To make him even o'er the time he has lost. Desire him to go in: trouble him no more, Till further settling. KING LEAR. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... tattered robe and forehead bare, That challenge all the torments of the air, Goes by! And the pent feelings choke in one long sigh, While, as the mimic thunder rolls, you hear The noble wreck of Lear Reproach like things of life the ancient skies, And commune with the storm! Lo! next a dim and silent chamber, where Wrapt in glad dreams, in which, perchance, the Moor Tells his strange story o'er, The gentle Desdemona chastely lies, Unconscious of the loving ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... effect had been lessened by the fact that nothing has been left to the imagination. On the other hand there has, since Shakespeare, been nothing so fine as the treatment of Pere Fouan, that peasant King Lear, by his ungrateful family. It has been urged that Zola overdid the horrors of the situation and that no parent would have been so treated by his children. By a singular chance a complete answer to this objection may be ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... within a foot Of the extreme verge; for all beneath the moon Would I not leap upright! KING LEAR. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... bitter, and in such sardonic phrases—as when he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and is usually nothing but a delicate dissimulation to attract the confidence of others"—that the more timid of his auditors shrank from him, as if he had been Hamlet or Lear. When he dared to suggest that none of these maxims were intended to refer to the reader himself, but only to all other persons, he invited the reaction which led Huet, Bishop of Avranches, to appeal against the morality of the "Maximes," ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... that gars the gear Is gone where glint the pawky een. And aye the stound is birkin lear Where sconnered yowies wheeped yestreen, The creeshie rax wi' skelpin' kaes Nae mair the howdie bicker whangs, Nor weanies in their wee bit claes Glour light as ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... titles nor in rank; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest. It's no in makin' muckle mair; It's no in books; it's no in lear; To make ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... favourite pickle; hence the "dangerous trade" of the samphire gatherer ("King Lear," act iv. sc. 6) who supplied the demand. It was sold in the streets, and one of the old London cries was "I ha' ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... husband in Tennessee, in order to be with the Mormon people); twelfth, Polly V. Young; thirteenth, Louisa Young (these two were sisters). Next, I was sealed to my fourteenth wife, Emeline Vaughn. In 1851 I was sealed to my fifteenth wife, Mary Lear Groves. In 1856 I was sealed to my sixteenth wife, Mary Ann Williams. In 1858 Brigham gave me my seventeenth wife, Emma Batchelder. I was sealed to her while a member of the Territorial Legislature. In 1859 I was sealed to my ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... never been on the water before, and could not know whether she were a good or a bad sailor. Aunt Sara and Elinor had told her unpleasant anecdotes of voyages; but when Dover Castle on its gray height, and white Shakespeare Cliff with its memories of "Lear," had faded from her following eyes, still she would hardly have known that the vessel was moving. The purring turbines scarcely thrilled the deck; and presently Mary ate sandwiches and drank a decoction of coffee, brought by her new friend. He laughed when she started ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... course all Shakespeare's plays that it was possible to read with any hope of attracting or interesting an audience. My father had limited his range to a few of the most frequently acted plays. I delivered the following twenty-four: King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline, King John, Richard II., two parts of Henry IV., Henry V., Richard III., Henry VIII., Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... needs woldst vnderstand my sham Which I did grieue and blush to ope to thee, And had lear di'd then told thee of the same, Now be not slacke to lend thy helpe to me, Thou forst me for to open my disgrace, Then lend thy help ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... impending crag which rose near it, had acquired the name of St. Swithin's Chair. it was the scene of a peculiar superstition, of which Mr. Rubrick mentioned some curious particulars, which reminded Waverley of a rhyme quoted By Edgar in KING LEAR; and Rose was called upon to sing a little legend, in which they had been interwoven by ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... That virtue ought not to suffer in a tragedy, is not well considered: Monimia in the Orphean, Belvidera in Venice Preserved, Athenais in Theodosius, Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear, Desdemona in Othello, Hamlet, (to name no more,) are instances that a tragedy could hardly be justly called a tragedy, if virtue did not temporarily suffer, and vice for a while triumph. But he recovers himself in the same paragraph; and leads us to look up to the FUTURE for ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... it noted, a student of Bergson at the Ecole Normale—found his ideal in the great story of the young girl of Domremy who saved France when all the pomp and wisdom of generals had broken down. And in our own poetry has not Mr. Bottomley rewritten the Lear story, with the focus of power and interest transferred from the old king—left with not an inch of king in him—to a ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Castlewood could not operate upon the said eyes then and there, like the barbarous monsters in the stage-direction in King Lear. When her ladyship was going to tear out her daughter's eyes, she would retire smiling, with an arm round her dear child's waist, and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fount of Castaly. The Philadelphia school board has declared itself an aggregation of asses. "Les Miserables" is the greatest poem of divine humanity that this world has known since Shakespeare wrote "Lear." But I suppose "Lear," too, is immoral. I suppose everything is immoral, from "Oedipus, the Tyrant," to Hall Caine's "Christian," that teaches that men are born of woman, and that love will have its way, even unto all bitterness. It is eminently fitting that "Les Miserables" ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... is informed through the channel of a letter from yourself to Mr. Lear, that M. Duplaine, Consul of France at Boston, has lately, with an armed force, seized and rescued a vessel from the officer of a court of justice, by process from which she was under arrest in his custody: and that he has in like manner, with an armed force, opposed and prevented the officer, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... settle down comfortably in lodgings, in Dove Court, Mansion House. He was soon hard at work upon 'The Death of Rizzio,' adorning his walls with pictures he had brought with him or sent for afterwards from Kendal, such as 'King Lear,' 'Elfrida,' 'The Death of Lefevre,' and a few portraits of friends. The Rizzio picture has been represented as 'a work of extraordinary merit, combining energetic action with strong expression.' Its fate was sad ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... allusion to the line, "Nothing can come of nothing." from Shakespeare's "King Lear," ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... been insulting us. Ancient Father of Christendom, under whose sheltering shadow once slept in peace for near a thousand years the now storm-tossed nations of Western and Central Christendom, couldst thou indeed, when turned out a houseless[47] fugitive like Lear upon a night of tempest, still retain aught of thy ancient prestige, and through the might of belief rule over those who ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... delight of the Washington playgoers in the Jackson Administration. His wonderful impersonations of Richard III., Iago, King Lear, Othello, Shylock, and Sir Giles Overreach were as grand as his private life was intemperate and eccentric. He was a short, dumpy man, with features resembling those of the Roman Emperors, before his nose was broken in a quarrel, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... position, as compared with that of others infinitely your inferiors—that shows you at once the man of genius and the gentleman. Macready, you acknowledge, is perhaps your superior in such parts as Lear and Hamlet; but did he ever paint a single side-scene in his life? Beverley, they say, is equal to Stanfield in the poetry of his landscapes; and you confess that in his airs and distances he surpasses your noblest efforts. Ask yourself, my dear friend, if he ever fought ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... rhymed poems are his Sonnets, in which he chronicles many of the various moods of his mind. The plays consist of tragedies, historical plays, and comedies. The greatest of his tragedies are probably Hamlet and King Lear; the best of his historical plays, Richard III. and Julius Csar; and his finest comedies, Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It. He wrote in the reign of Elizabeth as well as in that of James; but his greatest works belong to the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... have seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar, and the creature run from the cur. There thou might'st behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office." You have—very well. Take crazy King Lear's words as a text for a sermon against legislative inconsistencies, and come back ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... for you, George, there's no end to your softness. You're that green, that the very cows would eat you." Was it not well said by Mr. Robinson in his preface to these memoirs, that the poor old commercial Lear, whose name stood at the head of the firm, was cursed with a Goneril,—and with ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... are individualities instead of individuals. They do not exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistent traits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informing characteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth, senility in Lear, or irresoluteness in Hamlet. A great fictitious character must be at once generic and specific; it must give concrete expression to an abstract idea; it must be an individualized representation of the typical qualities of a class. It is only figures of this sort that ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... LEAR, EDWARD (1812-1888).—Artist and miscellaneous author, b. in London, and settled in Rome as a landscape painter. He was an indefatigable traveller, and wrote accounts, finely illustrated, of his journeys in Italy, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... me deeply," said Cutts, applying himself diligently to the decanter; "but you don't drink. Do you know you put me a good deal in mind of Macready? Did you ever hear him in Lear, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... show those at home how easy it was to get there; how easy to get home again. Moreover, though going to sea in the Shannon was not quite the same 'as going to sea in a sieve,' our stay-at-home friends were of the same mind as those of the dear little Jumblies, whom Mr. Lear has made immortal in his New Book of Nonsense; and we were bound to come back as soon as possible, and not 'in twenty years or more,' if ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... impersonation on the stage, minutely from some living model? Surely observation and natural originality is more than the photographic copying of your "conscientious" artist! Worse feebleness still it is when an artist has to paint a well-known character, say King Lear or Mary Queen of Scots, and goes about hunting for a living person as near as possible in appearance to the original, and then costumes and slavishly reproduces him or her, without any show of judgment or ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... girl said, "without you cutting up crazy and making folks talk. If you want to dance, for goodness' sake hire somebody to lear—to teach you, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... still retained his violent and intractable temper; in his home there was much to excite his leonine wrath and sense of intolerable wrong. Three times he had quitted his villa, with vows never to return to it, and three times he had been led back. When for a fourth time—like a feeble yet majestic Lear—one hot summer day, toward noon, he flung himself, or was flung, out of doors with only a few pauls in his pocket, it was to Casa Guidi that he made his way broken-hearted, yet breathing forth wrath.[73] Browning had often ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... chief, 'my worthy arch and patron.'—King Lear; or from the Teutonic 'arg,' a rogue. It usually denotes roguish, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... see Lear acted—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... of a poet myself, you see! Well,—there's your property. And with what your Mother left you will buy books and writing paper! As for my property—that's going to Jack. I've got the papers for that too. Not being an idiot I've saved out enough for myself—no Lear business for mine! Well, boy—I'm sorry you're a fool. But you've got what ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Wright brothers to bother; but when he got as far as London from Bath the wing-strings broke and he fell, plop! on a particularly hard temple of Apollo. After him reigned his son, no less a person than King Lear. I got this out of a queer little old book I bought the first day we came, but I assumed the air of having known it since childhood. There's another legend, it seems, about Bladud and a swine, but it's less esoteric than this, and ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... who in 1711 and 1712 appeared in such characters as Falstaff, Lear, and Cortez in 'the Indian Emperor,' now and then also played the part of the favourite stage hero, Alexander the Great in Lee's Rival Queens. He was a good actor, spoilt by intemperance, who came on the stage sometimes ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... difficulties still exist and may be seen all about us. In order to illustrate the situation baldly, and at the same time to put it dramatically, it may be well to take an instance concerning which we have no personal feeling. The tragedy of King Lear has been selected, although we have been accustomed so long to give him our sympathy as the victim of the ingratitude of his two older daughters, and of the apparent coldness of Cordelia, that we have not sufficiently considered the weakness of his fatherhood, revealed by the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... people and their enemies in many a fight, who had sought battle in their behalf and heaped them with favors. His eyes saw the depth of that resignation which gave to God the one jewel that would have atoned for the horrid sufferings of the past. If he were free! He thought of old Lear moaning ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... individual genius, but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creation of a nation's spirit; and the artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, but gave it form, and nothing but form. Nor would the form itself have been attained by any isolated talent. No genius ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... resembling the Gregorian chant or the sequences of Notker of Tubilo), the other voices would sing songs in the vernacular, and, strangest of all, one voice would repeat some Latin word, or even a "nonsense word" (to use Edward Lear's term) but much more slowly than the other voices. Thus the needs of the Mystery were as well met by incipient counterpoint on the one hand, as, on the other, the secular song-play ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this—in Hamlet and King Lear—as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which possess, above all, that winning attractiveness ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... sweet smell of the forest as it is borne down from the mountains and carried seaward, to gladden, it may be, the heart of some hard-worked, broken-spirited sailor, who, in a passing ship, sees from aloft this fair, fair island with its smiling green of lear, and soft, heaving valleys, above the long lines of curving beach, showing white and bright in the morning sun! And, as you walk, the surf upon the reef for ever calls and calk; sometimes loudly with ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... with entire sincerity,—I said,—always feels himself in danger of two things, namely,—an affectation of bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and actual rudeness. What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him. Life ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... bad, eh? [Quickly] Wait, now, here's something from King Lear. The sky is black, see? Rain is pouring down, thunder roars, lightning—zzz zzz zzz—splits the ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... do better than follow Dr. Prior on this word: "Harlock, as usually printed in 'King Lear' ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... nor in rank; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest. It's no in makin' muckle mair; It's no in books; it's no in lear; ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... huge offspring of the gods and giants of the dawn of time. For mighty exceedingly were these men. At the noise of them running to battle all Ireland shook, and the illimitable Lir [Footnote: Lir was the sea-god, the Oceanns of the Celt; no doubt the same as the British Lear, the wild, white-headed old king, who had such singular daughters; two, monsters of cruelty, and one, exquisitely sweet, kind, and serene, viz.: Storm, Hurricane, and Calm.] trembled in his watery halls; the roar of their brazen chariots reverberated ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... ruler of England wrung his hands. "I see you are resolved to drive me to distraction. This is the final stroke. My daughter wishes to desert me. Lear," he added, piteously, "was only a touch to me. You are Goneril and ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... the contrast there was between the small annoyances, the squalid cares of even the greatest leaders of men and the brave outward show of their reception by the masses. And the other scene of which I thought, was the appearance of Mr. Irving on a first night in some big play, say, like "Lear." All the public know is that the actor is there, on the stage, to pronounce his kingly speech; but, before he has got there, Mr. Irving, perhaps, has had the sleepless nights which are required in thinking out the smallest details of his business; perchance, the second before he looks down on ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... passionate conviction to support it. There is a passage in a letter of Branwell's to Leyland, the sculptor, written in 1845, where he says he is writing a three-volume novel of which the first volume is completed. He compares it with "Hamlet" and with "Lear". There is also Branwell's alleged statement to Mr. Grundy. And there is an obscure legend of manuscripts produced from Branwell's hat, before the eyes of Mr. Grundy, in an inn-parlour. Leyland argues freely from the antecedent probability ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... Othello, and Lear were roles in which he [Burbage] gained especial renown. But Burbage and Shakespeare were popularly credited with co-operation in less solemn enterprises. They were reputed to be companions in many sportive adventures. The sole anecdote of ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... "King Lear" soon after "Macbeth," and I shall never forget the feeling of horror when I came to the scene in which Gloster's eyes are put out. Anger seized me, my fingers refused to move, I sat rigid for one long moment, the blood throbbing in my temples, and all the hatred that a child can feel ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... } He who could tame his vast ambition down To please some scatter'd gleanings of a town, And, if some hundred auditors supplied Their meagre meed of claps, was satisfied, How had he felt, when that dread curse of Lear's Had burst tremendous on a thousand ears, While deep-struck wonder from applauding bands Return'd the tribute of as many hands! Rude were his guests; he never made his bow To such an audience as salutes us now. He lack'd the balm of labor, female praise. Few Ladies in his time frequented plays, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... or read at many of the library story hours. Lear's nonsense rhymes and certain rhythmical story poems are especially enjoyed by the children. Outlines of stories or selections from books designed to lead to the reading of an entire book are mentioned in connection with Dickens, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... and the denial of its omnipotence was powerfully accentuated in America by the very conditions of its colonization. The good yeomen of England who journeyed to America went in the spirit of the noble and intrepid Kent, when, turning his back upon King Lear's temporary injustice, he said that he would "shape his old course in a country new." Was it strange that the early colonists, as they braved the hardships and perils of a dangerous voyage, only to be confronted in the wilderness by disease, famine ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... as to get what he could of power and wealth and dignity in the scramble, was, I think, Caesar's purpose. The rest grew upon him. As Shakspeare, sitting down to write a play that might serve his theatre, composed some Lear or Tempest—that has lived and will live forever, because of the genius which was unknown to himself—so did Caesar, by his genius, find his way to a power which he had not premeditated. A much longer time is necessary for ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... of "fourscore and upwards," like Lear, and who, like Lear, have been "mightily abused" in their day, are found, upon diligent inquiry, to have long outlived themselves, like the Archbishop of Granada; but here is a man, or was but the other day, in his eighty-second year, with the temper and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... matches Peter, 35 Though he took nineteen years, and she three days In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays, Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress Like King Lear's 'looped and windowed ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the most splendid poetry to be met with in Shakspeare, may be found in the parts of Juliet and Constance; the most splendid, perhaps, excepting only the parts of Lear and Othello; and for the same reason,—that Lear and Othello as men, and Juliet and Constance as women, are distinguished by the predominance of ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... went at others because he wasn't. The Pudneys, who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the storm-lashed heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the crackle of the new chintz) and the difference only made his smirches and bruises, his splendid tainted genius, the more tragic. If he wasn't barefoot in the mire he was sure to be unconventionally ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... latter class, who have been branded as traitors and villains, were single-minded, earnest, valiant men; and, as for even O'Flynn, and those worse than him, what was really the matter with them was, that they were too honest—they spoke out too much of their whole minds. Bewildered, like Lear, amid the social storm, they had determined, like him, to become "unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"—seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... and she lay insensible across his arms, her fair head hanging back, her white garments streaming in the air, her golden locks floating, her witching eyes closed, and her blue lips apart and rigid on her glistening teeth—so she lay like dead Cordelia in the arms of old Lear. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... are exhibited in daily, homespun dress, and stalking abroad through the centuries, the generous and brave nobility of King Lear, Caesar, Othello, and Hamlet, will be seen in marked contrast to Shylock, Brutus, Cassius, Iago, Gloster and Macbeth. His fools and wits were philosophers, while many of his kings, queens, dukes, lords and ladies were sneaks, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... which followed, were written by both Charles Lamb and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the work was originally produced it had illustrations ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... talk frankly enough to David. At such times his language took an exasperating Shakespearean turn. He was abominably fond of posing as Lear or Jaques—as a man much buffeted, and acquainted with all the ugly secrets of life. Purcell stood generally for 'the enemy;' and to Purcell his half-mad fancy attributed most of his misfortunes. It was Purcell who had undermined his business, taken away his character, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... play, the deepest in meaning, the best knit from the first scene to the last. While 'Othello' centres on jealousy, 'Lear' on madness, 'Romeo and Juliet' on love, 'Macbeth' turns on fate, on the supernal influences which compel a man with good in him to a murderous course. The weird witches who surround the ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... knew no peace. The elements were, and are now, and forever will be quarreling upon its worn and battered head; lightning and rain and snow and wind are forever hammering and beating it turn by turn. It is the Quasimodo and the Lear and the Gray Friar of mountains, all in one. And if, on some still and perfect day, its tonsured head emerges from the clouds, the watcher in the Park has but to turn his head a moment, and look again, and lo! it wears its gray cowl as before, and stoops ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... subjects, equally well-executed (which, however, rarely happens), are the best."[75] Though each is perfect in its kind, there can be no difficulty in deciding the question of greatness between "King Lear" and "The Comedy of Errors." "The greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions: for the power of imagination, in works of invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions, which are the subject of them."[76] One also finds ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... card-playing to take place, raffles, or St Leger sweeps to be held in his house. "You have seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar, and the creature run from the cur. There thou might'st behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office." You have—very well. Take crazy King Lear's words as a text for a sermon against legislative inconsistencies, and come back with ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... spell of these performers, I wrote a series of studies of the tragedian in his greatest roles. "Edwin Booth as Lear," "Edwin Booth as Hamlet," and so on, recording with minutest fidelity every gesture, every accent, till four of these impersonations were preserved on the page as if in amber. I re-read my Shakespeare in the light of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... to; he is a real actor—of the traditional school, of course—but great, all the same. It has always seemed to me that his Lear was one of the fine performances of the stage to-day. But even Mantell has to travel halfway across the country every season; he couldn't stay in New York—no, nor in intellectual and appreciative Boston, either. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... being remediless,—I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering above the other loves,—Shakspeare had done something for the filial in Cordelia, and, by implication, for the fatherly too in Lear's resentment; he left it for you to explore the depths ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... I h'ard my mither ance say she was some feared Donal micht hae ta'en to makin' sangs himsel'; no 'at there was ony ill i' that, she said, gien there wasna ony ill i' the sangs themsel's; but it was jist some trifflin' like, she said, an' they luikit for better frae Donal, wi' a' his buik lear, an' his Euclid—or what ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... houses. There is always feud where there is not understanding. There is eternal feud between those two camps of misunderstanding, age and youth. This play, written by a young man, shows the feud from the point of view of youth. The play of King Lear shows it from the point of view of age. This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, too cold to care for beauty. The bright, beautiful creatures ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... to catch striking details and to present them vividly and interestingly. Examples: Hawthorne's "Sylph Etherege" and "Old Esther Dudley;" Poe's "The Man of the Crowd;" James' "Greville Fane" and "Sir Edmund Orme;" Stevenson's "Will o' the Mill;" Wilkins' "The Scent of the Roses" and "A Village Lear." ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... the humblest; who sympathized with all classes and conditions of men, as readily with the sufferings of the tattered beggar and the poor chimney- sweeper's boy as with the starry contemplations of Hamlet "the Dane," or the eagle-flighted madness of Lear. ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... dramatists; you have read Shakespeare?" "Yes, every play again and again." "Which do you like best?" "I like them all, the historical and the imaginative; I have never seen one acted, but to me King Lear is his masterpiece." ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... Metaphor to the Simile is ascribed by Dr. Whately to the fact that "all men are more gratified at catching the resemblance for themselves, than in having it pointed out to them." But after what has been said, the great economy it achieves will seem the more probable cause. Lear's exclamation— ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... bad woman. Let people overburdened with credulity believe that she is bad," cried Doederlein, with the expression and in the tone and gesture of the royal Lear, and shook his Olympian locks. "The fact is that violence has been practised on her; she has been driven into ruin! Men have stolen the sweet love of my dearly beloved daughter through the use of vile tricks and artifices. Where is she, the unfortunate, betrayed child? With what is she clothing ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... veteran, groaning, and shaking his reverend head, "I have seen the day when there was not a lad in England forked so largely, so comprehensively-like, as I did. But, as King Lear says at Common Garden, 'I be's ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... something picturesque in the big, comfortable shoulders of the Cote. That delicate critic M. Emile Montegut, in a charming record of travel through this region published some years ago, praises Shakespeare for having talked (in "Lear") of "waterish Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point. I stopped at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque, but I might almost have seen the little I discovered without stopping. It is a drowsy Burgundian town, very old ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of Shakspeare, and remember that I formerly misrepresented your opinion of Lear. Be pleased to write the paragraph as you would have it, and send it[335]. If you have any remarks of your own upon that or any other play, I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... who deal with human character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas. For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing. What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew less geography than Tommy who goes to ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the tawse of old Bleach-the-boys. But if the business went on at this rate there would be little in it for the boy. Gourlay was not without a thought of his son's welfare when he packed him off to Skeighan. He would give him some book-lear, he said; let him make a kirk or a ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... lips, hesitating to reply. He wished to keep back as much of the dread truth as possible. He feared the effect upon his daughter of the startling announcement that young Massetti was wandering about amid the ruins of the Colosseum like a second King Lear on the blasted heath. But Maximilian ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... when there arises in their hearts a pleasure in the growing number of his years expressly as these constitute a deduction from the unknown sum total of those which have been appointed him; and when the utmost bravery of their affection must breathe, not Serus, but CITO in cadum redeas! O royal Lear of our literature, who have spurned from your love the dearest daughter of your thought, is it only left us to say, "How friendly is Death,—Death, who restores us to free relations with the whole, when our own fierce partialities have imprisoned and bound ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... and her Young Ones, in Scudder, Book of Fables and Folk-Stories; The Monk and the Bird, in Scudder, Book of legends; The Owl and his School, in Ramaswami Raju, Indian Fables; The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, Lear (poem), in Story-Telling Poems; The Partridge and the Crow, in Dutton, The Tortoise and the Geese; The Pious Robin, in Brown, Curious Book of Birds; The Rustic and the Nightingale, in Dutton, The Tortoise and the Geese; The Sparrows, Thaxter (poem), in Story-Telling Poems; The ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... Santa Clans doings and the principal actor in them, and no end of speculations as to his inducements and purposes to be served in taking so much trouble. For Shampuashuh people were shrewd, and did not believe, any more than King Lear, that anything could come of nothing. That he was not moved by general benevolence, poured out upon the school of the white church, was generally agreed. "What's we to him?" asked pertinently one of ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... wonted light,—to drain the clouds at a fit season,—to confine rivers within their channels,—and to cause all things necessary for his people to be borne by the earth.' '(They told me I was everything. But when the rain came to wet me once, when the wind would not peace at my bidding,' says Lear, 'there I found them, there I smelt them out.)' This, in connection with the preceding anecdote, to which, in the opinion of this author, it comes properly so very near, may be classed of itself among the suggestive stories above referred to; but the bearing of these quotations upon the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... long speeches quite beautiful; he is excessively graceful and all his actions and attitudes are good, though not at all good-looking in face... I came away just as Hamlet was over." Later on, she went to see Macready in King Lear. The story was new to her; she knew nothing about it, and at first she took very little interest in what was passing on the stage; she preferred to chatter and laugh with the Lord Chamberlain. But, as the ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... of Brutus and Cato, the rapid and hurried vehemence of Hotspur, mark the class of characters I mean. But he fails where a ready and pliable yielding to the events and passions of life makes what may be termed a more natural personage. Accordingly I think his Macbeth, Lear, and especially his Richard, inferior in spirit and truth. In Hamlet, the natural fixed melancholy of the prince places him within Kemble's range;—yet many delicate and sudden turns of passion slip through ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... he was able to settle down comfortably in lodgings, in Dove Court, Mansion House. He was soon hard at work upon 'The Death of Rizzio,' adorning his walls with pictures he had brought with him or sent for afterwards from Kendal, such as 'King Lear,' 'Elfrida,' 'The Death of Lefevre,' and a few portraits of friends. The Rizzio picture has been represented as 'a work of extraordinary merit, combining energetic action with strong expression.' Its fate was sad enough; attracting no notice, producing no profit, and at length becoming ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... we find the fatality in "Hamlet," "King Lear," in "Macbeth"? Is its throne not erected in the very centre of the old king's madness, on the lowest degree of the young prince's imagination, at the very summit of the Thane's morbid cravings? Macbeth we may well pass by; not need we linger over ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... principal cities to some ruler of this line, the historian relates the story of King Leir, the founder of Leicester. As this monarch's life has been used by Shakespeare for one of his dramas,—the tragedy of "King Lear,"—and is familiar to all students of English literature, there is no need to outline Geoffrey of Monmouth's ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Screen was given as a memorial of the late Mr. Sidney Lear by his wife, to whom the cathedral is indebted for many of its modern enrichments. It is entirely of wrought metal, by Skidmore, of Coventry, and a good example of its class. It replaced the organ screen compiled by Wyatt from fragments of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... power of wrath, inheriting the high, hasty temper of his mother. Tobias Lear, his intimate friend and private secretary, says that in the winter of 1791, an officer brought a letter telling of General St. Clair's disastrous defeat by the Indians. It must be delivered to the President himself. He left his family and guests at table, glanced over the contents, and, ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... virum. Your theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of "Kubla Khan") the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote "Golden Wings," "The Blue Closet," and "The Sailing of the Sword;" and, close up, Mr. Lear, the author of "The Yongi Bongi Bo," an the lay of ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... German, it will be remembered that the ladies ask Sanin to sing something in his mother tongue. "The ladies praised his voice and the music, but were more struck with the softness and sonorousness of the Russian language." I remember being similarly affected years ago when I heard "King Lear" read aloud in Russian. Baron von der Bruggen says,* "there is the wonderful wealth of the language, which, as a popular tongue, is more flexible, more expressive of thought than any other living tongue I know of." No one has paid a ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... and struck a vein of reminiscence of a very poignant kind. Browning told us that he did not know Landor very well, but that he saw him in the last years of his life under circumstances of a terribly pathetic kind. Landor played almost exactly the part of King Lear—though from a different reason—and got almost exactly King Lear's reward. Landor, it will be remembered, was originally a rich man. It will also be remembered that he was possessed of a very arbitrary and turbulent nature and quarrelled with many members of his family, and especially ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... 'History of Spanish Literature' may be found his touching letter to De Guzman at the Moorish court. He is, like Lear, poor and discrowned, but not like him, weak. His prelates have stirred up strife, his nobles have betrayed him. If Heaven wills, he is ready to pay generously for help. If not, says the royal philosopher, still, generosity and loyalty exalt the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... grand Battalia Pie, in which the bodies of chickens, pigeons, and rabbits were embalmed in spices, cocks' combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a Lear. A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish of oyster-loaves and a ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great. It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most deeply colors the imagination. When the boy is wandering through fields, sitting in the shade ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... intense power of invention and expression in domestic drama; (King Lear and Hamlet being essentially domestic in their strongest motives of interest). There is a tendency at this moment towards a noble development of our art in this direction, checked by many adverse conditions, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... impetuous declamation of English poetry by Akshay Chowdhury, our initiator into English literature, there was the wildness of intoxication. The frenzy of Romeo's and Juliet's love, the fury of King Lear's impotent lamentation, the all-consuming fire of Othello's jealousy, these were the things that roused us to enthusiastic admiration. Our restricted social life, our narrower field of activity, was hedged in with such ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... fairly on English ground now; of course, it is wet weather. The phenomena of the British climate have not changed much since the time when the rains "let fall their horrible pleasure" upon the head of the poor, drenched outcast, Lear. Thunder and lightning, however, which belonged to that particular war of the elements, are rare in England. The rain is quiet, fine, insinuating, constant as a lover,—not wasting its resources in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... material of a rakish Stratford lad's schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years' association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so easily into the actor-manager with a good share ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... young man with a great mind and a great heart but with a feeble will which collapses under too heavy a task and comes to the verge of insanity; Cordelia, the English Antigone, the devoted daughter of the proscribed King Lear; Falstaff, glutton, coward, diverting and gay, a kind of Anglo-Saxon Panurge. A whole dramatic literature has come from Shakespeare. To France he was introduced by Voltaire and then scorned by him because he had succeeded ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... the picture—a palace, a table abundantly spread, lights and music, delight and banqueting, gladness and fulness, society and sustenance. The guests sit close and all partake. To be within means food, shelter, warmth, festivity, society; to be without, like Lear on the moor, is to stand the pelting of the storm, weary, stumbling in the dark, starving, solitary, and sad. Within is brightness and good cheer; without is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... has it in both its modern meanings, "vigorous," or "sensitive in nerves, and consequently weak, diseased." Hysteria is not in the Bible, and is found once in Shakespeare; as, "Hysterica passio, down," Lear ii. 4. It was common in Sydenham's day,—i.e., Charles II. and Cromwell's time,—but he classified under hysteria many disorders no longer considered as of ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... it had a composing effect upon those who heard it. At least I know I found it dull, and half dozed during its monotonous delivery. Indeed, it was not till Thackeray reached his concluding words—which, by the way, were Shakspeare's, being an effective quotation from "King Lear"—that I was ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... manner in which Shakspeare's fools and jesters—in some respects the wisest and thoughtfullest characters in his works—talk. If his words be "light as air," they vent "truths deep as the centre." If the Fool in "Lear" had written letters to his friends and acquaintances, I think they would have marvellously resembled this epistle to Patmore; and if, in saying this, I compliment the Fool, I hope I do not derogate from the genius of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... outer skies and seas of fire and foam, From splendour soft as dew that sundawn thrills To gloom that shudders round the world it fills, From midnights murmuring round Titania's ear To midnights maddening round the rage of Lear, The wonder woven of storm and sun became One with the light that lightens from his name. The music moving on the sea that felt The storm-wind even as snows of springtide melt Was blithe as Ariel's hand ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty even there; while with Virgil, Dante and Milton, we walk unscathed in Hell itself. The terribilita of Michaelangelo, the chaos and anarchy of Shakespeare at his greatest, as in Lear—these find expression in perfect rhythms, so potent that we recognize them as proceeding from a supernal beauty, the beauty of that soul "from which also cometh the life of man and of beast, and of the birds of the air and of ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... disguise much of his own life-story? Shakespeare alone, of men of genius of the first rank, seems to have learned comparatively few of his lessons in the school of suffering. But, possibly, if more were known of Shakespeare, it would be found that Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet are but the expressions of lessons learned as ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... cannot help feeling that Pindar's Isle of the Blest, whither he was brought by Thetis, whose mother's prayer had moved the Heart of Zeus, to dwell with Cadmus and Peleus, is Achilles' true home; or the isle of the heroes of all time, described by Carducci, where King Lear sits telling OEdipus of his sufferings, and Cordelia calls to Antigone, "Come, my Greek sister! We will sing of peace to our fathers." Helen and Iseult, silent and thoughtful, roam under the shade of the myrtles, while the setting sun kisses their golden hair with ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... it to hide a blush? He looks delighted; and I almost fancy I see a proud colour on his brow. As I gaze, these young people make for me a perfect idyl. The generous, ungrudging sun, the melancholy ruin, decked, like mad Lear, with the flowers and ivies of forgetfulness and grief, and between them, sweet and ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... is not more admired for writing his plays, than Garrick for acting them. I think him a very good and very various player—but several have pleased me more, though I allow not in so many parts. Quin[3] in Falstaff, was as excellent as Garrick[4] in Lear. Old Johnson far more natural in everything he attempted. Mrs. Porter and your Dumesnil surpassed him in passionate tragedy; Cibber and O'Brien were what Garrick could never reach, coxcombs, and men of fashion. Mrs. Clive is at least as perfect ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... fret of heart and soul, The loneliness and passion of King Lear; No more bewilderment and broken words Of wild ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... example, it was not the two last, but the two first volumes of "Clarissa" that he prized; "for give me a sick-bed and a dying lady," said he, "and I'll be pathetic myself. But Richardson had picked the kernel of life," he said, "while Fielding was contented with the husk." It was not King Lear cursing his daughters, or deprecating the storm, that I remember his commendations of; but Iago's ingenious malice and subtle revenge; or Prince Hal's gay compliance with the vices of Falstaff, whom he all along despised. Those plays had ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Congreve a share in their theatre; and he promised in return to furnish them with a play every year, if his health would permit. Two years passed, however, before he produced the Mourning Bride, a play which, paltry as it is when compared, we do not say, with Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands very high among the tragedies of the age in which it was written. To find anything so good we must go twelve years back to Venice Preserved, or six years forward to the Fair ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... so harsh and bitter, and in such sardonic phrases—as when he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and is usually nothing but a delicate dissimulation to attract the confidence of others"—that the more timid of his auditors shrank from him, as if he had been Hamlet or Lear. When he dared to suggest that none of these maxims were intended to refer to the reader himself, but only to all other persons, he invited the reaction which led Huet, Bishop of Avranches, to appeal against the morality of the "Maximes," as suited only to the vices of ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... home how easy it was to get there; how easy to get home again. Moreover, though going to sea in the Shannon was not quite the same 'as going to sea in a sieve,' our stay-at-home friends were of the same mind as those of the dear little Jumblies, whom Mr. Lear has made immortal in his New Book of Nonsense; and we were bound to come back as soon as possible, and not 'in twenty years or more,' if we wished them ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... it in an impersonal acceptation, without a Nominative to it expressed. One or two examples will serve to exhibit the use and effect of this anomalous Tense:—Shuidh an ['o]g bhean air sgeir, is a s['u]il air an lear. Chunnaic i long a' teachd air barraibh nan tonn. Dh' aithnich i aogas a leannain, is chlisg a cridhe 'n a com. Gun mhoille gun tamh, buailear dh' fhios na traighe; agus faighear an laoch, 's a dhaoine m' a thimchioll. ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... make their children blind; But fathers that wear bags Do make their children kind. —Shakespeare (King Lear, ii. 4). ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... I have directed Mr. Lear, my private secretary, to lay before you a copy of the adoption and ratification of the Constitution of the United States by the State of North Carolina, together with a copy of a letter from His Excellency Samuel Johnston, president ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... translation of Letourneur. Before that translation began to appear, JEAN-FRANCOIS DUCIS (1733-1816), the patron of whose imagination was his "Saint Guillaume" of Stratford, though he knew no English, had in a fashion presented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his countrymen; King Lear, Macbeth, King John, Othello (1792) followed. But Ducis came a generation too soon for a true Shakespearian rendering; simple and heroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an age of philosophers and sentimentalists, an age ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Elizabeth should have so treated her, and as I didn't sleep any more than she did, though, owing to very different feelings about Elizabeth, I made up my mind as to some things I would say to her when she got back. And if she has never read "King Lear" I will see that she hears it read before very long with a glossary, and comments of my own on ingratitude and things of that sort. Also she may ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... Paris like a disgusting wound. A few days later he became more enthusiastic, and wrote: "You will be very proud of 'Le Pere Goriot.' My friends insist that nothing is comparable to it, and that it is above all my other compositions."[*] Certainly the vivid portrait of old Goriot, that ignoble King Lear, who in his extraordinary passion of paternal love rouses our sympathy, in spite of his many absurdities and shortcomings, is a striking instance of Balzac's power in ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... at Stratford they pointed out to her the desk at which Shakespeare sat as a lad, with all its boyish hieroglyphics, and her thought instinctively leaped across the years to "The Tempest," "King Lear," and "Hamlet." She pondered deeply the relation between the activities of the lad and the behavior of the man, wondering how much the school had to do with the plays that stand alone in literature, and whether ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Tibbie's harns, Nae college lear had reached her, An' a' she kent aboot her job Her ain ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... poetry into drama, an epic and lyric poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the success ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the choice to tally greatest bards, To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate at will, Homer with all his wars and warriors—Hector, Achilles, Ajax, Or Shakspere's woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello—Tennyson's fair ladies, Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme, delight of singers; These, these, O sea, all these I'd gladly barter, Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... touched with the buoyant influences of the Muse. Shakspeare and Plato are lighter than levity; they are lifting forces, and weigh less than nothing. The novelette of the season, or any finest and flimsiest gossamer that is fabricated in our literary looms, compares with "Lear," with "Prometheus Bound," with any supreme work, only as cobwebs and thistle-down, that are easily borne by the breeze, may compare with sparrows and thrushes, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... were either the abode, or the educators, of such men as the Venerable Bede, Lanfranc and Anselm, Duns Scotius, William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth (who preserved the legends of Arthur, of King Lear, and Cymbeline), of Geraldus Cambrensis, of St. Thomas a Kempis, of Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk, and of Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar, who came very near guessing several important truths which have since been made known to ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... expulsion, penury, and wanderings he has undergone, had deserted his cause—had looked with indifferent eyes on his awful woes—had joined with Creon to expel him from the Theban land. They are the Goneril and Regan of the classic Lear, as Antigone is the Cordelia on whom he leans—a Cordelia he has never thrust from him. "When," says Oedipus, in ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... other early chroniclers, interwoven with current legends and pieced together with additions from his own fertile imagination, the whole professing to be a translation of a chronicle found in Brittany; this remarkable history is the source of the stories of King Lear, Cymbeline, Merlin, and of Arthur and his knights as they have since taken shape in English literature; d. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry and strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... conscience scent everywhere allusions, references, and hints. Hence history is banished from the stage; for the history of the past constantly points with a menacing finger at the sore spots of the present. Shakespeare's 'King Lear' has been prohibited, because the public might believe princes would lose their heads if weighed down by misfortunes. 'Hamlet,' 'Richard the Third,' and 'Macbeth' must not be performed, because people might get accustomed to the dethronement and assassination of emperors and ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... role by noting that the scoring throughout tends to glutinousness, like that of the pre-war Carlsbad plum; further, that a solo on the muted viola against an accompaniment of sixteen sarrusophones is only effective if the sarrusophones are prepared to roar like sucking-doves, which, as LEAR would have said, "they seldom if ever do." Still, on the whole the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... happiness. There was a mixture of novelty, of joy, of patriotic enthusiasm, felt by every heart. A committee of twelve was appointed in town-meeting to superintend the reception. The president left his carriage at Greenland, at the residence of Colonel Tobias Lear, and mounted his favorite white horse; he was there met by Colonel Wentworth's troop, and on Portsmouth plains the president was saluted by Major General Cilly, and other officers in attendance. From the west end of the State House, on both sides of Congress Street, and into Middle ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... objections, That virtue ought not to suffer in a tragedy, is not well considered: Monimia in the Orphean, Belvidera in Venice Preserved, Athenais in Theodosius, Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear, Desdemona in Othello, Hamlet, (to name no more,) are instances that a tragedy could hardly be justly called a tragedy, if virtue did not temporarily suffer, and vice for a while triumph. But he recovers himself in the same paragraph; and leads us to look up to the FUTURE for the reward of ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... extravagant praise, but for its justice we confidentially appeal to the record. The plays which have most severely tried the sagacity of Shakspeare's critics, are Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello. We do not hesitate to say that Mr. Hudson's analysis and representation of these are the most thorough, accurate, and comprehensive which exist at present either in English or German. Compare him or these tragedies ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... humanity,—a humanity brilliant with virtues, dark with crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almost unaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world. On Hamlet's brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation. No hope of a hereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia. Macbeth, hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of future retribution,—assure him only of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... talked freely enough now—of her school; of riding and motoring—she seemed to love going very fast; about Newmarket—which was 'perfect'; and theatres—plays of the type that Johnny Dromore might be expected to approve; these together with 'Hamlet' and 'King Lear' were all she had seen. Never was a girl so untouched by thought, or Art—yet not stupid, having, seemingly, a certain natural good taste; only, nothing, evidently, had come her way. How could it—'Johnny Dromore duce, et auspice Johnny Dromore!' She had been taken, indeed, to the National ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... said he had "a very young look and an easy soldier-like air and gesture," and in the same year Curwen mentioned his "fine figure" and "easy and agreeable address." Nathaniel Lawrence noted in 1783 that "the General weighs commonly about 210 pounds." After death, Lear reports that "Doctor Dick measured the body, which was as follows—In length 6 ft. 3-1/2 inches exact. Across the shoulders 1.9. Across the elbows 2.1." The pleasantest description is Jefferson's: "His person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly what one would wish, his deportment ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... familiarity his caution vanished, and poor Cos lamentably disgraced himself at Sir Charles Mirabel's table, by premature inebriation. A carriage was called for him: the hospitable door was shut upon him. Often and sadly did he speak to his friends at the Kitchen of his resemblance to King Lear in the plee—of his having a thankless choild, bedad—of his being a pore worn-out lonely old man, dthriven to dthrinking by ingratitude, and seeking to ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early 'dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See {tube}, {tty}; compare {dumb terminal}, {smart terminal}. See "{TV Typewriters}" (Appendix A) for an interesting true story about ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... presents himself is the ruminative hermit already mentioned—a species of uninspired Thoreau. His name was Benjamin Lear. So far as his craziness went, he might have been a lineal descendant of that ancient king of Britain who figures on Shakespeare's page. Family dissensions made a recluse of King Lear; but in the case of Benjamin there were no mitigating circumstances. He had no family to trouble ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... perjured, and thou simular man of virtue, Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. — Lear. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and "Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in "Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... gracing Caesar's triumph, she snatches a dagger, exclaiming, "I will trust my resolution and my good hands." With the same swift instinct, Cassius trusts to his hands when he stabs Caesar: "Speak, hands, for me!" "Let me kiss your hand," says the blind Gloster to Lear. "Let me wipe it first," replies the broken old king; "it smells of mortality." How charged is this single touch with sad meaning! How it opens our eyes to the fearful purging Lear has undergone, to learn that royalty is no defence ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... had left her first husband in Tennessee, in order to be with the Mormon people); twelfth, Polly V. Young; thirteenth, Louisa Young (these two were sisters). Next, I was sealed to my fourteenth wife, Emeline Vaughn. In 1851 I was sealed to my fifteenth wife, Mary Lear Groves. In 1856 I was sealed to my sixteenth wife, Mary Ann Williams. In 1858 Brigham gave me my seventeenth wife, Emma Batchelder. I was sealed to her while a member of the Territorial Legislature. In 1859 I was sealed to my eighteenth wife, Teressa Morse. I was sealed to her ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... every [one] else so that looks at him. They have no speculation in them, as Shakespear says; what should be white is red, and there is no sight or crystal, only a black spot. It alters his countenance, and he looks like a man in a tragedy, as in K[ing] Lear, that has had his eyes put out ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... grew worse rapidly, and early in the morning Dr. Craik was sent for. Washington said to Mr. Lear, his private secretary: ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... presence of my mother and my regent aunt, but if my small cousin, the Most Christian King, should enter, I must be dethroned, and a succession of bows must ensue before we can either of us be seated. I always fear that I shall some day break out with the speech of King Lear's fool: 'Cry you mercy, I took you for a ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... affords the most extensive view, and it is one of the loveliest that can be imagined, too. Out of a billowy upheaval of vivid green foliage, a rifle-shot removed, rises the huge ruin of Heidelberg Castle, [2. See Appendix B] with empty window arches, ivy-mailed battlements, moldering towers—the Lear of inanimate nature—deserted, discrowned, beaten by the storms, but royal still, and beautiful. It is a fine sight to see the evening sunlight suddenly strike the leafy declivity at the Castle's base and dash up it and drench it as with a luminous spray, while the adjacent ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... man "fourscore and upwards," like Lear, and like Lear, too, "mightily abused," about five feet seven, a little stooping, but still vigorous and alert; with a pleasant, fresh countenance, and the complexion of a middle-aged, plump, healthy woman, such as Rubens or Gilbert Stuart would gloat over in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... Joseph Reinach has successfully passed off long extracts from my story as descriptions of the Tanks upon British officers who had just seen them. The filiation was indeed quite traceable. They were my grandchildren—I felt a little like King Lear when first I read about them. Yet let me state at once that I was certainly not their prime originator. I took up an idea, manipulated it slightly, and handed it on. The idea was suggested to me by the contrivances of a certain Mr. Diplock, whose ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... It may run very well in a tale, that "God will temper the winds to the shorn lamb!" but how can I expect that she will be shielded, when my naked bosom has had to brave continually the pitiless storm? Yes; I could add, with poor Lear—What is the war of elements to the pangs of disappointed affection, and the horror arising from a discovery of a breach of confidence, that snaps ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... (which yet were neuer taught by any man as farre as I do knowe) I wyll enstruct you after the treatyse of fractions. And now for this tyme fare well, and loke that you cease not to practyse that you haue lear ned. S. Syr, with moste harty mynde I thanke you, bothe for your good learnyng, {and} also your good cou{ns}el, which (god wyllyng) I ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... of poverty with the Strick family, and Loveday was sent to fetch the evening milk from the farm at the crest of the hill. On the way, she came upon Cherry Cotton and Primrose Lear, seated upon a granite stile, their heads together over something Cherry held in her lap. Cherry heard approaching footsteps, and whipped her apron over the object she and her friend had been so busily discussing. Loveday was hurt ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... erudition we owe, I will not say the best, (for that would be saying little,) but a good, edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, has complimented the Philaster, which he himself describes as inferior to the Maid's Tragedy by the same writers, as but little below the noblest of Shakspeare's plays, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, &c. and consequently implying the equality, at least, of the Maid's Tragedy;—and an eminent living critic,—who in the manly wit, strong sterling sense, and robust style of his original works, had presented the best ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Juliet leans her cheek upon her hand, And prattles to the night. Anon, a reverend form With tattered robe and forehead bare, That challenge all the torments of the air, Goes by! And the pent feelings choke in one long sigh, While, as the mimic thunder rolls, you hear The noble wreck of Lear Reproach like things of life the ancient skies, And commune with the storm! Lo! next a dim and silent chamber, where Wrapt in glad dreams, in which, perchance, the Moor Tells his strange story o'er, The gentle Desdemona ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... shook like those of a palsied old man. I sank upon a stone to rest, to try and arrange my scattered ideas into some sort of connection and order. Mad! I clasped my aching head between my hands, and brooded on the fearful prospect looming before me, and in the words of poor King Lear, I ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French king, in "Lear," was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age. They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius. The wicked king was to die, and the ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... induced, without much persuasion, to join the rest of the party at dinner. In the evening, all (Fairthorn excepted) draw round the fire. Waife is entreated by George to read a scene or two out of Shakespeare. He selects the latter portion of "King Lear." Darrell, who never was a playgoer, and who, to his shame be it said, had looked very little into Shakespeare since he left college, was wonderstruck. He himself read beautifully—all great orators, I suppose, do; but ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... humanity. Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and what makes him worth attending to is that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience. He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... in daily, homespun dress, and stalking abroad through the centuries, the generous and brave nobility of King Lear, Caesar, Othello, and Hamlet, will be seen in marked contrast to Shylock, Brutus, Cassius, Iago, Gloster and Macbeth. His fools and wits were philosophers, while many of his kings, queens, dukes, lords and ladies ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... every case he had both the address and his reply, copied upon opposite pages of one of his folio letter-books, now in the Library of Congress. These copies are respectively in the handwriting of WASHINGTON's private secretaries, viz:—Major William Jackson: Tobias Lear: Bartholomew Dandridge and G. ...
— Washington's Masonic Correspondence - As Found among the Washington Papers in the Library of Congress • Julius F. Sachse
... courteous towards the worsted gentry; had he lived in our times, they might have worsted him for a libel: he says in King Lear, "A base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three suited, hundred pound, filthy, worsted ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... polished generation immediately sympathize with them. We need no numerous notes, no antiquarian dissertations, to enable the most ignorant to recognize the sentiments and diction of the characters of Homer; we have but, as Lear says, to strip off our lendings—to set aside the factitious principles and adornments which we have received from our comparatively artificial system of society, and our natural feelings are in unison with those of the bard of Chios and the heroes who live ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... but they do not fulfill the requirements of our modern short-story for the reason that they are not constructed for one single impression, but are in reality parts of possible longer stories. They are, as it were, parts of stories not unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and A Lear of the Steppes, and lack those complete and concise artistic effects found in the short-stories, Markheim and Mumu, by the same authors. Both Ruth and the Prodigal Son are exceptionally well told, possess a splendid moral tone, and are excellent prophecies of what the ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... During the lonely days, and still more lonely nights, he thought much about the past. He knew that he had made a failure of life, and that he had nothing to live for now. At times he would endeavor to fan the coals of rebellion by reading "King Lear," "Timon of Athens," and the story of Old Aeneas. But the effect was never lasting, and when the artificial stimulation subsided he was ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... the Channel, as she had never been on the water before, and could not know whether she were a good or a bad sailor. Aunt Sara and Elinor had told her unpleasant anecdotes of voyages; but when Dover Castle on its gray height, and white Shakespeare Cliff with its memories of "Lear," had faded from her following eyes, still she would hardly have known that the vessel was moving. The purring turbines scarcely thrilled the deck; and presently Mary ate sandwiches and drank a decoction of coffee, brought by her new friend. He laughed when she started at ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen, ordered the destruction of 272 volumes of the English translation of Balzac's "Les Contes Drolatiques" on the ground that the book was obscene. "Les Contes Drolatiques" is an acknowledged masterpiece, and is not nearly so free spoken as "Lear" or "Hamlet" or "Tom Jones" or "Anthony and Cleopatra." What would be thought of a French magistrate or a German magistrate who ordered a fair translation of "Hamlet" or of "Lear" to be burnt, because of its obscenity? He would be regarded ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... never been paid for. It has never asked the gold nor the plaudits of the multitude. Job, and Hamlet, and Faust, and Lear, were never written to fill the pages of a Sunday newspaper. John Milton and John Bunyan were not publishers' hacks; nor were John Hampden, John Bright, or Samuel Adams under pay as walking-delegates ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... of provisions, money, and men. A few more dollars, a detachment of marines, and the fight was won. His answer was a letter from the Commodore, informing him, "that the reigning Pacha of Tripoli has lately made overtures of peace, which the Consul-General, Colonel Lear, has determined to meet, viewing the present moment propitious to such a step." With the letter came another from Lear, ordering Eaton to evacuate Derne. Eaton sent back an indignant remonstrance, and continued to hold the town. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... Schaudervollste, wenn es nicht unpoetisch werden soll, kann man auch nur in dem buntscheckigen Gewaende des Laecherlichen darstellen, gleichsam versoehnend—darum hat auch Shakespeare das Graesslichste im "Lear" durch den Narren sagen lassen, darum hat auch Goethe zu dem furchtbarsten Stoffe, zum "Faust," die Puppenspielform gewaehlt, darum hat auch der noch groessere Poet (der Urpoet, sagt Friederike), naemlich Unser-Herrgott, allen Schreckensszenen ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... Queene, or Shakespeare's tender women, the Juliet we love, the Rosalind who is ever in our hearts, the Beatrice, the Imogen, gentle Ophelia, or kindly but ill-starred Desdemona, or the great heroes of tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello, or I might ask you to hear a word about Ben Jonson, "rare Ben," or poor Philip Massinger who died a stranger, of the Puritan Milton, the great Catholic Dryden, or Swift, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Plato are lighter than levity; they are lifting forces, and weigh less than nothing. The novelette of the season, or any finest and flimsiest gossamer that is fabricated in our literary looms, compares with "Lear," with "Prometheus Bound," with any supreme work, only as cobwebs and thistle-down, that are easily borne by the breeze, may compare with sparrows and thrushes, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... borne down from the mountains and carried seaward, to gladden, it may be, the heart of some hard-worked, broken-spirited sailor, who, in a passing ship, sees from aloft this fair, fair island with its smiling green of lear, and soft, heaving valleys, above the long lines of curving beach, showing white and bright in the morning sun! And, as you walk, the surf upon the reef for ever calls and calk; sometimes loudly with a deep, resonant boom, but mostly with a soft, faint murmur like the low-breathed sigh of a woman ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... of the dawn of time. For mighty exceedingly were these men. At the noise of them running to battle all Ireland shook, and the illimitable Lir [Footnote: Lir was the sea-god, the Oceanns of the Celt; no doubt the same as the British Lear, the wild, white-headed old king, who had such singular daughters; two, monsters of cruelty, and one, exquisitely sweet, kind, and serene, viz.: Storm, Hurricane, and Calm.] trembled in his watery halls; the roar of their brazen chariots reverberated from the solid canopy of heaven, ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... call the most universal genius that ever existed. He has a truly wonderful variety. It is almost impossible to pronounce in which he has done best, his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Othello. He is equally excellent in his comic vein as his tragic. Falstaff is in his degree to the full as admirable and astonishing, as what he achieved that is noblest under the auspices of the graver ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... married Pleyel. In a wild state of frenzy he would go to Paris at once and seek revenge. He started, got as far as Nice, grew calmer, remained at Nice for a month, during which time the Overture to "King Lear" was written, then returned to Rome by the way of Genoa ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... 'King Lear' and 'Cymbeline' came from Geoffrey's 'Historia Britonum,' as did also the story of 'Gorboduc,' the first tragedy in the English language. Milton intended at one time that the subject of the great poem for which ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... so evident when Johnny Cake is eaten by the Fox, or when Little Hen eats the bread, or when Little Pig outwits the Wolf. The humorous element for children also lies in the incongruous, the exaggerated, or in the grotesque, so well displayed in Lear's Nonsense Rhymes, and much of the charm of Alice in Wonderland. The humorous element must change accordingly for older children, who become surprised less easily, and whose tales therefore, ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... Shakespeare is for the most part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this—in Hamlet and King Lear—as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which possess, above all, that ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare. There is, perhaps, no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions, and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking oppositions of contrary characters, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... nothing better than those sudden leaps from society, and M. Egiste Brancadori, who kept the Marzocco, was one of those unconscious buffoons of whom he was continually in search in real life, one of those whom he called his "Thebans", in reference to King Lear. "I'll talk a word with this same learned Theban," cried the mad king, one knows not why, when he meets ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... home To the outer skies and seas of fire and foam, From splendour soft as dew that sundawn thrills To gloom that shudders round the world it fills, From midnights murmuring round Titania's ear To midnights maddening round the rage of Lear, The wonder woven of storm and sun became One with the light that lightens from his name. The music moving on the sea that felt The storm-wind even as snows of springtide melt Was blithe as Ariel's hand or voice might make And bid all ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... first blush seems to us incapable of personification. Thus at one time*1* he likens men to clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the browsing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads; while at another he addresses an old red hill of Georgia as "Thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer."*2* Like other Southern poets,*3* Lanier sometimes fails to check his imagination, and in consequence leaves his readers "bramble-tangled in a brilliant maze," as in his description of the stars in 'June ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose south-western quarter is here described, may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex—Lear. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... "passages omitted in representation." This is, however, essentially an inartistic practice, and one cannot regret that it has gone out of fashion. Another point to be considered is this: are Othello and Lear really very complex character-studies? They are extremely vivid: they are projected with enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords scope for the most vehement self-expression; but are they not, in reality, colossally simple ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... all its foolish and cruel fables; with all its infamous doctrines; with its spirit of caste; with its spirit of hatred, and tell me whether it was written by a good God. Why, if you will read the maledictions and curses of that book, you would think that God, like Lear, had divided heaven among his daughters, and then, in the insanity of despair, had launched his curses upon the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... create from a few meagre suggestions a vital and impressive work of art. One thinks instinctively, in seeking for some adequate parallel, of what Goethe did with the materials of the Faust legend, or of what Shakespeare did with the indications offered for 'King Lear' and 'Cymbeline' by Holinshed's chronicle-history. And the two greatest names in modern literature are suggested not only by this general fact of creative power, but also more specifically by certain characters in the trilogy. Audhild, the Icelandic maiden beloved of Sigurd, has more than ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... operate upon the said eyes then and there, like the barbarous monsters in the stage-direction in King Lear. When her ladyship was going to tear out her daughter's eyes, she would retire smiling, with an arm round her dear child's waist, and then ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the ladies ask Sanin to sing something in his mother tongue. "The ladies praised his voice and the music, but were more struck with the softness and sonorousness of the Russian language." I remember being similarly affected years ago when I heard "King Lear" read aloud in Russian. Baron von der Bruggen says,* "there is the wonderful wealth of the language, which, as a popular tongue, is more flexible, more expressive of thought than any other living tongue I know of." No one has paid a ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... is a printer by trade, an editor by profession, and a hunter by choice. When busily employed he usually puts his hat in his pocket, and his thin hair and long beard stream in the wind, giving him a wild look, much like that of King Lear in an illustrated copy of Shakespeare which tumbles ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... assured that he is a critic born—may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined the author of ‘The Returne from Parnassus’ in despising the unacademic author of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’ Among this band of great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the epic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening a ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... charm, however; there is something picturesque in the big, comfortable shoulders of the Cote. That delicate critic M. Emile Montegut, in a charming record of travel through this region published some years ago, praises Shakespeare for having talked (in "Lear") of "waterish Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point. I stopped at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque, but I might almost have seen the little I discovered without stopping. It is a drowsy Burgundian town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, vistas always ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Museum. He served with distinction in the Civil War as captain in the 28th Massachusetts infantry regiment. From 1867 to 1870, with John McCullough, he managed the California theatre, San Francisco. Among his many and varied parts may be mentioned Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard III., Wolsey, Benedick, Richelieu, David Garrick, Hernani, Alfred Evelyn, Lanciotto in George Henry Boker's (1823-1890) Francesca da Rimini, and James Harebell in The Man o' Airlie. He played Othello to Booth's Iago and Cassius to his Brutus. He acted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... in the Shakespearian width of sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate Iago and Shylock with the visible ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... which Shakspeare's fools and jesters—in some respects the wisest and thoughtfullest characters in his works—talk. If his words be "light as air," they vent "truths deep as the centre." If the Fool in "Lear" had written letters to his friends and acquaintances, I think they would have marvellously resembled this epistle to Patmore; and if, in saying this, I compliment the Fool, I hope I do not derogate from the genius of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... robbed him of his books, besides cheating and plaguing him in the economy of his house, etc., etc. His feelings on such an outrage, both as a parent and a scholar, must have been singularly painful. Hayley compares him to Lear. See part third, Life of Milton, by W. Hayley (or Hailey, as spelt in the edition ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... again the fret of heart and soul, The loneliness and passion of King Lear; No more bewilderment and broken words Of ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... Richardson has it in both its modern meanings, "vigorous," or "sensitive in nerves, and consequently weak, diseased." Hysteria is not in the Bible, and is found once in Shakespeare; as, "Hysterica passio, down," Lear ii. 4. It was common in Sydenham's day,—i.e., Charles II. and Cromwell's time,—but he classified under hysteria many disorders no longer considered as of ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... the Santa Clans doings and the principal actor in them, and no end of speculations as to his inducements and purposes to be served in taking so much trouble. For Shampuashuh people were shrewd, and did not believe, any more than King Lear, that anything could come of nothing. That he was not moved by general benevolence, poured out upon the school of the white church, was generally agreed. "What's we to him?" asked pertinently one of the old ladies; and vain efforts were made to ascertain ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... times rather read it at home, if it were not for Booth's playing. A farce or a comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home." He was much pleased one night with Mr. McCullough's delineation of the character of "Edgar," which the actor played in support of Edwin Forrest's "Lear." He wished to convey his approval to the young actor, and asked Mr. Brooks, his companion at the moment, with characteristic simplicity, "Do you suppose he would come to the box if we sent word?" Mr. McCullough was summoned, and, standing at the door of the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... Shakespeare, in the same manner, will derive inspiration from the national past; he will go back to the time of the Roses, to the time of the Plantagenets, to the time of Magna Charta, and, passing over the Anglo-Saxon period, he will take from the Britons the stories of Lear ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... two or three walms on the fire in the broth; then dish the chines in thin slices of fine French bread, broth them, and lay on them some boiled beef-marrow, boil'd in strong broth, some slic't lemon, and run all over with a lear made of beaten butter, the yolk of an egg or two, the juyce of two or three oranges, and ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... himself a mischief, and keeps a lear eye still, for fear it should escape him. A man that sees a great deal more in every thing than is to be seen, and yet he thinks he sees nothing: his own eye stands in his light. He is a fellow commonly guilty of some weaknesses, which he ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... follow Dr. Prior on this word: "Harlock, as usually printed in 'King Lear' and in ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... make pa go when once we begin in that way? As I mean to end, so I'll begin. And as for you, George, there's no end to your softness. You're that green, that the very cows would eat you." Was it not well said by Mr. Robinson in his preface to these memoirs, that the poor old commercial Lear, whose name stood at the head of the firm, was cursed with a Goneril,—and ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... remember amongst other amusements which we had as children the pictures at which we were permitted to look. There was Boydell's Shakspeare, black and ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling Fuselis! there were Lear, Oberon, Hamlet, with starting muscles, rolling eyeballs, and long pointing quivering fingers; there was little Prince Arthur (Northcote) crying, in white satin, and bidding good Hubert not put out his eyes; there was Hubert crying; there was ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has used them. But we have room now for only one of those priceless sentences in which he has set the diamond and the pearl as they were never set before. No kingly diadem can boast such jewels as glow along these lines from "Lear":— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... and thou simular man of virtue, Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. — Lear. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... her time. She was once taken out to dinner by General Washington when he was President. Madam Hancock, whose husband had been President of the Continental Congress and Governor of Massachusetts, complained to General Washington's Secretary, Mr. Lear, that that honor belonged to her. The Secretary told General Washington, the next day, what she said. The General answered that it was his privilege to give his arm to the handsomest woman in the room. Whether the reply was communicated to Mrs. Hancock, or whether she was comforted ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... away from the subscriber, on Sunday night, 27th inst., my NEGRO GIRL, Lear Green, about 18 years of age, black complexion, round-featured, good-looking and ordinary size; she had on and with her when she left, a tan-colored silk bonnet, a dark plaid silk dress, a light mouslin delaine, also one watered silk cape and one tan colored cape. I have reason ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Antiquities, 6 vols. 8vo. Lond. 1813,—which was suppressed by the author after a few copies had been sold. I have the second and third volumes, being all that relates to Shakspeare. They consist of an edition of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and the third satire of Horace, copiously illustrated with notes and woodcuts, intended to prove that in the works in question, in common with "all the classics and the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... All Saints' Day, after wandering awhile about a swampy churchyard in the suburb of Maria Hilf, to see the melancholy spot of light which glimmered at each grave-head, I went to the Burg Theatre, and witnessed Shakespeare's play of "King Lear" (and the best actor in Vienna played the Fool); and further, that I spent the evening of Christmas Day in Daum's coffee-house in reading Galignani's Messenger, in order to bring myself, in imagination at least, as near ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... some appear extravagant praise, but for its justice we confidentially appeal to the record. The plays which have most severely tried the sagacity of Shakspeare's critics, are Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello. We do not hesitate to say that Mr. Hudson's analysis and representation of these are the most thorough, accurate, and comprehensive which exist at present either in English or German. Compare him or these tragedies ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... from its womb, usurped its throne, and ever since the maddened old creature, with hoary crest of foam, wails and laments continually, like King Lear exposed to the fury ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... Lieutenant-Colonels Garland and Wilson, commanding brigades in General Twiggs' division; Colonels Mitchell, Campbell, Davis, and Wood, commanding the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and 2d Texas regiments, respectively; and Majors Lear, Allen, and Abercrombie, commanding the 3d, 4th, and 1st regiments of infantry; all of whom served under my eye, and conducted their commands with coolness and gallantry against the enemy. Colonel Mitchell, Lieutenant-Colonel ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... "Ah, Lear!" now she cried, with sense of long injustice toward him; "you were right, and I was wrong; at least—at ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... talk with entire sincerity,—I said,—always feels himself in danger of two things, namely,—an affectation of bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and actual rudeness. What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt to run to mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... glades for pleasure and repose, no vistas through which to view some towering hill or elevated temple; everything in that crowded space seems of the same value: he speaks with no more awe of "King Lear" than of the last Cobden prize essay; he has swallowed them both with the same ease, and got the facts safe in his pouch; but he has no time to ruminate because he must still be swallowing; nor does he seem to know what even Macbeth, with Banquo's murderers ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... effect upon those who heard it. At least I know I found it dull, and half dozed during its monotonous delivery. Indeed, it was not till Thackeray reached his concluding words—which, by the way, were Shakspeare's, being an effective quotation from "King Lear"—that I was roused from my ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... uncommon bright, the duke was, and he soon struck it. He dressed Jim up in King Lear's outfit—it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theater paint and painted Jim's face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead, dull, solid blue, like a man that's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... virtue ought not to suffer in a tragedy, is not well considered: Monimia in the Orphean, Belvidera in Venice Preserved, Athenais in Theodosius, Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear, Desdemona in Othello, Hamlet, (to name no more,) are instances that a tragedy could hardly be justly called a tragedy, if virtue did not temporarily suffer, and vice for a while triumph. But he recovers himself in the same paragraph; and leads us to look up to the FUTURE for the reward ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... proprietor of this hotel, was the principal manager in the unloading of the records and furniture belonging to the government when the ships bringing it from Philadelphia docked at Lear's Wharf. Abraham Bradley, who, as Assistant Postmaster General, had charge of the removal of that department, and Joseph Nourse, who was Registrar of the Treasury, may also have stopped at Crawford's ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... he sees, but we see not him. We become part of him, feel with him, judge, behold with him; but we think of him as little as of ourselves. Do we think of Aeschylus while we wait on the silence of Cassandra,[G] or of Shakspeare, while we listen to the wailing of Lear? Not so. The power of the masters is shown by their self-annihilation. It is commensurate with the degree in which they themselves appear not in their work. The harp of the minstrel is untruly touched, if his own glory is all that it records. Every great writer may be at once ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... himself, and that from boyhood his handwriting was beautifully neat, almost like copper-plate, in its precision and elegance, we shall understand what a task it must have been for him to keep up his correspondence. A little later he employed a young New Hampshire graduate of Harvard, Tobias Lear, who graduated in 1783, who served him as secretary until his death, and undoubtedly lightened the epistolary cares of the General. But Washington continued to carry on much of the letter-writing, especially the intimate, himself; and, like the Adamses and other statesmen of ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... the fatality in "Hamlet," "King Lear," in "Macbeth"? Is its throne not erected in the very centre of the old king's madness, on the lowest degree of the young prince's imagination, at the very summit of the Thane's morbid cravings? Macbeth we may well pass by; not need we linger over Cordelia's father, for ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... scenery was monotonous to the Pierian colonists, and the people distasteful. The clipped hair and penitential scowl of the men made heavy the hearts of the Muses; their daughters and wives had a sharp, harsh, pert "tang" in their speech, that grated upon the ears of Apollo, who held with King Lear as to the excellence of a low, soft voice in woman. Each native seemed to the strangers sadly alike in looks, dress, manners, and pursuits, to every other native. Of Art they were absolutely ignorant. They built their temples on the same model as their barns. Poetry meant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... his child begot in adultery; and in the compassion of Titus Andronicus, grown childish through grief, for a fly which had been struck dead, and his rage afterwards when he imagines he discovers in it his black enemy; we recognize the future poet of LEAR. Are the critics afraid that Shakespeare's fame would be injured, were it established that in his early youth he ushered into the world a feeble and immature work? Was Rome the less the conqueror of the world because Remus could leap over its first walls? ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... summoned to Berlin, where he was for fifteen years the popular idol. He died there on the 30th of December 1832. Ludwig Devrient was equally great in comedy and tragedy. Falstaff, Franz Moor, Shylock, King Lear and Richard II. were among his best parts. Karl von Holtei in his Reminiscences has given a graphic picture of him and the "demoniac fascination" of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... widow, that is, she had left her first husband in Tennessee, in order to be with the Mormon people); twelfth, Polly V. Young; thirteenth, Louisa Young (these two were sisters). Next, I was sealed to my fourteenth wife, Emeline Vaughn. In 1851 I was sealed to my fifteenth wife, Mary Lear Groves. In 1856 I was sealed to my sixteenth wife, Mary Ann Williams. In 1858 Brigham gave me my seventeenth wife, Emma Batchelder. I was sealed to her while a member of the Territorial Legislature. In 1859 I was sealed to my eighteenth wife, Teressa ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... seem to pass into real madness in Ophelia. King Lear's growing perturbation becomes insanity the moment he ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... of life; and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are so moved when Levine labours in the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, "not cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in Dostoieffky's DESPISED AND REJECTED, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes that please the great heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of danger, but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Junction City, Kansas, has written a series of short stories on the property rights of women in Kansas, a subject that was and is, still, of vital importance to the women of the state. "The Legal Status of Mrs. O'Rourke" and "King Lear in Kansas" are two ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... woldst vnderstand my sham Which I did grieue and blush to ope to thee, And had lear di'd then told thee of the same, Now be not slacke to lend thy helpe to me, Thou forst me for to open my disgrace, Then lend thy help to salue my ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... perfectly simple step—the sale of an estate. She cannot do this, is ruined, and thrown out into the unsympathetic world. Chekhov is the dramatist, not of action, but of inaction. The tragedy of inaction is as overwhelming, when we understand it, as the tragedy of an Othello, or a Lear, crushed by the wickedness of others. The former is being enacted daily, but we do not stage it, we do not know how. But who shall deny that the base of almost all human unhappiness is just this inaction, manifesting itself in slovenliness of thought ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... feelings of Germans; or, by analogy, with the interest excited in us by similar dramas in our own language. Few, I trust, would be rash or ignorant enough to compare Schiller with Shakspeare; yet, merely as illustration, I would say that we should proceed to the perusal of Wallenstein, not from Lear or Othello, but from Richard II., or the three parts of Henry VI. We scarcely expect rapidity in an historical drama; and many prolix speeches are pardoned from characters whose names and actions have formed the most amusing tales of our early life. On ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it is for the artist to fill himself to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out. I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an excellent thing to take all the trouble, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... highest degree of perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creation of a nation's spirit; and the artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, but gave it form, and nothing but form. Nor would ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the girl said, "without you cutting up crazy and making folks talk. If you want to dance, for goodness' sake hire somebody to lear—to teach you, same ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... Saintsbury was right, and I do care more for life than for poetry. No—I take it back. Do you know one of the tragedies—a Bible tragedy too—David—was written in his third period—much about the same time as Lear? The comedy, April Rain, is also a late work. Beckett is a fine ranting piece, like Richard II., but very fine for the stage. Irving is to play it this autumn when I'm in town; the part rather suits him—but who is to play Henry—a tremendous creation, sir. Betterton in his private journal ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... parents was that Carl should become a clergyman, but his distaste for theology did not go unexpressed. So perverse and persistent were his inclinations that they preyed on the mind of his father, who quoted King Lear and said, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... only be mentioned that his parts (among many not herein named) included the Ghost, Laertes, Horatio and the Prince in "Hamlet," Dick in "The Confederacy," Captain Worthy in the "Fair Quaker of Deal," Pyrrhus, Cato, Young Bevil in the "Conscious Lovers," Tamerlane, Oronooko, Jaffier, Othello, King Lear, Hotspur, Wildair, Sir Charles Easy, Falstaff, Cassio, Macbeth, Banquo, Lennox, Henry VIII. and Cinna. Few living players can match ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... method of comparing was introduced into English, both methods were often used with the same adjective; and, for a time, double comparatives and double superlatives were common; as, worser, most boldest. In "King Lear" Shakespeare uses the double comparative a dozen times.]; as, valuable, less valuable, least valuable. Most definitive and many descriptive adjectives cannot be compared, as their meaning will not admit ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... general the most valuable works of an author are published in the course of the last seventeen years of his life. I will rapidly enumerate a few, and but a few, of the great works of English writers to which my plan is more favourable than my noble friend's plan. To Lear, to Macbeth, to Othello, to the Fairy Queen, to the Paradise Lost, to Bacon's Novum Organum and De Augmentis, to Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, to Clarendon's History, to Hume's History, to Gibbon's History, to Smith's Wealth ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the one reading, the other sleeping, while the hours of the warm summer afternoon slipped away, ripples on the ocean of the lovely, changeless eternity, the consciousness of God. For a time the watching sister was absorbed in King Lear; then she fell to wondering whether Cordelia was not unkindly stiff toward her old father, but perceived at length that, with such sisters listening, she could not have spoken otherwise. Then she wondered whether there could be women so bad as Goneril and Regan, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... a reverend form With tattered robe and forehead bare, That challenge all the torments of the air, Goes by! And the pent feelings choke in one long sigh, While, as the mimic thunder rolls, you hear The noble wreck of Lear Reproach like things of life the ancient skies, And commune with the storm! Lo! next a dim and silent chamber, where Wrapt in glad dreams, in which, perchance, the Moor Tells his strange story o'er, The gentle Desdemona chastely lies, Unconscious of the ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... and therefore so is his interest. He sees the like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great. It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most deeply colors the imagination. When the boy is wandering through fields, sitting in the shade ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Lear and Cordelia! 'twas an ancient tale Before thy Shakespeare gave it deathless fame; The times have changed, the moral is the same. So like an outcast, dowerless and pale, Thy daughter went; and in a foreign gale Spread ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... years of the seventeenth century, between his thirty-seventh and forty-seventh year, he produced "Hamlet," "Measure for Measure," his part of "Pericles," "All's Well that Ends Well," "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Troilus and Cressida," "Cymbeline," "Coriolanus," and "Othello." These, with other works, were the fruit of his mind in its full maturity and vigor. Think of it a moment! ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... more than enough to puzzle Lord Macaulay, who, like the still more ignorant Doctor Samuel Johnson, knew nothing of the venerable language of the first inhabitants of the British Isles, and of all Western Europe, resolve themselves into Li! Li Beur! Lear-a! Buille na la, which signify, "Light! Light! on the sea, beyond the promontory! 'Tis the stroke (or dawn) of the day!" Like all the choruses previously cited, these words are part of a hymn to the sun, and entirely astronomical ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... with explanations and extenuations; for if it be true to itself it is sufficient in itself, and anything added to it or taken from it is an impertinence or a deformity. When we read 'Hamlet' and 'Lear,' or 'As You Like It' and 'Much Ado About Nothing,' we do not ask ourselves what Shakespeare meant by them,—why some scenes were written in verse and other scenes in prose,—for it is not of Shakespeare that we are thinking ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... which are as fine as anything of a similar nature in English criticism, should have been almost unnoticed (undiscovered, except by literary friends) until the year 1818, when Lamb's works were collected and published. The grand passage on "Lear" has caused the Essay on the Shakespeare Tragedies to be well known. Less known is the Essay on Hogarth, although it is more elaborate and critical; the labor being quite necessary in this case, as the ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... his audience with no heart for tragedy, and that they must have Pantomime, very wisely said, "If you won't come to 'Lear' and 'Hamlet,' I must give you Harlequin." And Harlequin he did give them, in the person of Woodward, one of the best of Harlequins that ever trod the stage. A contemporary print of the time, represents Woodward being weighed in one scale, with all the great ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... just when his dogship began to stand up on his hind legs in literature. He has little or no classical standing. The dog of Ulysses is, I believe, a solitary instance. Shakespeare's "view" comes out in Lear's climacteric execration of his "dog-hearted daughters." Sir Henry Holland once lost a bet of a guinea owing to his failure to find a dog kindly spoken of by Shakespeare. Milton for the most part sublimely passes them by, except to embellish ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... the evening, according to your taste or rank, in the cricket-field, or at the Opera, and you will soon find thoughts of the evening hazards and bets intrude themselves on the sermon, and that recollections of the popular melodies interfere with the psalms. Religion is thus treated like Lear, to whom his ungrateful daughters first denied one half of his stipulated attendance, and then made it a question whether they should grant him any ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... of himself and his old wife, who made the paper horrors in her bed, and how they needed everything, but didn't wish to beg. I was much touched, and flew home to look up the coat and some shoes, and when my old Lear came creeping in the back way, I ordered cook to give him a warm dinner and something nice for the ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... niggardly praised. Yet we will not disparage departed excellence for any person existing; and therefore cannot avoid wishing our young author had seen Garrick, and bearing in his "mind's eye" his natural acting of Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard, &c.—he might then go and witness the performances ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Colonel Lear, aide-de-camp to the General, was present. When the General left the room, the Colonel told me he had himself been in England, and had seen Arthur Young (who had been frequently named by the General ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... my mother and my regent aunt, but if my small cousin, the Most Christian King, should enter, I must be dethroned, and a succession of bows must ensue before we can either of us be seated. I always fear that I shall some day break out with the speech of King Lear's fool: 'Cry you mercy, I took you ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she said, "here learn the sacred lore;" This fancy realiz'd, the bard shall see, And his best commentator breathe in thee. She spoke: her magic powers the actor tried; Then Hamlet moraliz'd and Richard died; The dagger gleam'd before the murderer's eye, And for old Lear each bosom heav'd sigh; Then Romeo drew the sympathetic tear, With him and Cibber Love lay bleeding here. Enchanting Cibber! from that warbling throat No more pale Sorrow pours the liquid note. Her voice suppress'd, and Garrick's genius fled, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... 8. Lear King of England, and his Three Daughters, an Historical Play, acted at the Duke s Theatre 1687. It is one of Shakespear's most moving tragedies revived, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... are Hensman and Hinxman. Historians now regard Hengist and Horsa, stallion and mare, as nicknames assumed by Jutish braves on the war-path. Sumpter, Old Fr. sommetier, from Somme, burden, was used both of a packhorse and its driver, its interpretation in King Lear being a ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... "My prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings will never mark it. Think'st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling the hour in Caesar's Rome, buried that Roman 'stead o' burning him and gave Czechoslovakia ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... Geoffrey of Monmouth's wonderful chronicle of the old British kings, whose blood flowed in Robert's veins; that chronicle—wrought out of queer Welsh stories—that served as a foundation for Edward's claims on Scotland, and whence came our Lear and Cymbeline. ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... sat in corners with her eyes cast down; flushed whenever she was addressed; stammered whenever she answered a question, and nearly died of heart failure when subjected to an examination of any sort. She delighted the committee when reading at sight from "King Lear," but somewhat discouraged them when she could not tell the capital of the United States. She admitted that her former teacher, Miss Dearborn, might have mentioned it, but if so she had ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... malice, however, but answered, "That beats me, I own. Yet we shall drive, though it be upon two wheels an' behind a single horse. For Farmer Lear's driving into Tregarrick in an hour's time, an' he've ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Shakespeare wrote 'King Lear' at forty-one," he added, more humorously; and then burst out laughing. "I'd like to edit a series of 'Chloroform Classics,' to include only books written after forty. Who was that doctor man who recommended anaesthetics for us at that age? Now isn't that ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... exaggeration in saying: Many people frequent theaters ostensibly for the purpose of understanding the great dramatists, and, leading thereto, seeing noted tragedians act Lear, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and at the end of years of attendance have no conception of these dramas as a whole. They had heard one voice among the many; but when the many voices blended, what all meant they can ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Like Lear's—for he had felt the sting Of all too greatly giving The kingdom of his mind to those Who for it deemed him mad. [Footnote: Cale ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Be comforted, good madam; the great rage, You see is cured in him: and yet it is danger To make him even o'er the time he has lost. Desire him to go in: trouble him no more, Till further settling. KING LEAR. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... reminiscence of a very poignant kind. Browning told us that he did not know Landor very well, but that he saw him in the last years of his life under circumstances of a terribly pathetic kind. Landor played almost exactly the part of King Lear—though from a different reason—and got almost exactly King Lear's reward. Landor, it will be remembered, was originally a rich man. It will also be remembered that he was possessed of a very arbitrary and turbulent nature and quarrelled with many members of his family, and ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... nor in rank; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest; It's no in makin muckle mair; It's no in books, it's no in lear, To make us truly blest; If happiness hae not her seat And centre in the breast, We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest: Nae treasures, nor pleasures, Could make us happy lang; The heart ay's the part ay That makes us right ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... from a pole-star, all those great constellations of thought revolved. With Lear's madness was Cordelia's affection; with the inhumanity of Shylock was Jessica's trust; with the Moor's jealousy was Desdemona's devotion. The sweet and bitter of life, religion, poetry and philosophy, ambition, revenge and superstition, controlled, created or destroyed by that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... myself, I do not find M. Maeterlinck's consolations more genuinely consoling than other philosophy. On the second and far more poignant terror that still survives in the very nature of death, he hardly touches. I mean the severance of love, the disappearance of the beloved. "No, no, no life," cries Lear: ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the forest primeval presents itself, not less striking and unfamiliar. From the dead branches of those skeleton pines and hemlocks, these rampikes, hang masses of white moss, snow-white, amid the dark verdure. An actor might wear such a beard in the play of King Lear. Acadian children wore such to imitate "grandpere," centuries ago; Cowley's trees are ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... tumbledown houses "the dumb rhetoric," in which "tables, chairs, and joint stools are living, and significant things." In these passages Lamb seems to regard the comic merely as a means to an end;—"Who sees not," he asks, "that the grave-digger in Hamlet, the fool in Lear have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt; while the comic stuff in 'Venice Preserved,' and the doggrel nonsense of the cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher are ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... wrong person, was the most wonderful mixture of fun and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but everybody in the park called him, 'Father William'; and when he wanted to know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory deceives me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be steeped in the blood of the deer; Shylock ordered one pound of the carcase; Hamlet (the fact was impressed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his soul to a cinder with that odious drug," said Wingfold. "'Tis true, as Edgar in King Lear says: ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... 'my worthy arch and patron.'—King Lear; or from the Teutonic 'arg,' a rogue. It usually denotes ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... always feud where there is not understanding. There is eternal feud between those two camps of misunderstanding, age and youth. This play, written by a young man, shows the feud from the point of view of youth. The play of King Lear shows it from the point of view of age. This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, too cold to care for beauty. The bright, beautiful creatures dash ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... remembered the ballad, but my impression is that it was condemned as a fabrication for this and other neologies. The button is not a conspicuous item of female attire as of the male, and Shakespeare has been attacked for the vulgarity of even making Lear say, 'Prithee, undo this button,' though I ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... her fair head hanging back, her white garments streaming in the air, her golden locks floating, her witching eyes closed, and her blue lips apart and rigid on her glistening teeth—so she lay like dead Cordelia in the arms of old Lear. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... 1820. He was greatly praised in his day, and doubtless thought himself a great artist. He painted a vast number of portraits and quite a number of pictures of classical and historical subjects. His "Lear" is in the Boston Athenaeum; his "Hamlet and Ophelia" is in the Longworth collection in Cincinnati; "Christ Healing the Sick" is in the Pennsylvania Hospital; and the "Rejected Christ" is or was owned by Mr. Harrison, of Philadelphia. There are two portraits of West, one by Allston and ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... Southern Germany, as if all trouble were over and all had been forgiven. We walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
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