"Lear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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. That is all ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Lear, Sophocles was cursed with ungrateful children. Shakspeare's imagination went no further than TWO ungrateful daughters: Sophocles had in reality four sons, all as ungrateful as those monsters of Shakspeare's brain. The extreme age and bodily infirmities of their venerable ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • 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
... Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry and strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... 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
... 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, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 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
... 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... 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
... 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; ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... 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, and he has shown more of it in this play than ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... 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 |
