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More "Actor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rose dramatically heavenwards. His brow grew black and his voice had the vibration of the great orator or the great actor. "When I think of this daily judicial murder of ten long years that I passed through, then waves of blood seem to tremble before my eyes, and it seems as if a sea of blood would choke me. Galley-slaves appear ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... been made in this history of Mr. Garbetts, Principal Tragedian, a promising and athletic young actor, of jovial habits and irregular inclinations, between whom and Mr. Costigan there was a considerable intimacy. They were the chief ornaments of the convivial club held at the Magpie Hotel; they helped each other in ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in. Not such his evening, who with shining face Sweats in the crowded theatre, and, squeez'd And bor'd with elbow-points through both his sides. Outscolds the ranting actor on the stage; Nor his, who patient stands till his feet throb. And his head thumps, to feed upon the breath Of patriots bursting with heroic rage, Or placemen, all tranquillity and smiles. This folio of four pages, happy work! Which not e'en critics criticise; that holds Inquisitive attention, while ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... common kinds from the Zoological Society at the price of five pounds for each; but he offered to give double the price, if he might keep three or four of them for a few days, in order to select one. When asked how he could possibly learn so soon, whether a particular monkey would turn out a good actor, he answered that it all depended on their power of attention. If when he was talking and explaining anything to a monkey, its attention was easily distracted, as by a fly on the wall or other trifling object, the case was ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... to a conclusion my narrative of the extraordinary events in which I have taken part, either as a spectator or an actor, during the course of a strangely diversified life, of which nothing now ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... himself as well as in his words to attract the attention of the convention.[995] Added years gave him a more stately, almost a picturesque bearing, while a strikingly intelligent face changed its expression with the ease and swiftness of an actor's. This was never more apparent than now, when he turned, abruptly, from the alleged sins of Republicans to the alleged virtues of Democrats. Relaxing its severity, his countenance wore a triumphant smile as he declared in a higher and more resonant key, that "if this ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... names of Carlyle, Talfourd, R. Hengist Horne, Leigh Hunt, Procter, Monckton Milnes, Dickens, Wordsworth, Landor, among those of distinguished persons who became known to Browning at this period.[18] His "simple and enthusiastic manner" is referred to by the actor Macready in his diary; "he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw." Browning's face was one of rare intelligence and full of changing expression. He was not tall, but in early years he was slight, was graceful in his movements, and held his head high. His dark brown ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... famous diamonds, which shone through the gloom like pin-pricks of fire. Garda Desmaines, the wonderful Garda, sat next to her host, her bosom and hair on fire with jewels, yet with the most wonderful light of all glowing in her eyes. A famous actor, who had thrown his proverbial reticence to the winds, kept his immediate neighbors in a state of semi-hysterical mirth. The clink of wine glasses, the laughter of beautiful women, the murmur of cultivated voices, rising and swelling through the faint, mysterious gloom, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the late Sir Nathaniel Holland, then Mr. Dance, an eminent painter, whose portrait of Garrick in the character of Richard the Third is the best and most spirited representation of that unrivalled actor that ever appeared, though all the most distinguished artists of the time employed themselves on the same admirable subject. The correspondence that had taken place between Mrs. Kauffman and Mr. Dance became known, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... frequented by men of ancient name and exalted position, was not graced by the presence of their wives. The very house she occupied had a doubtful reputation, having been a gift to the wife of Talma the actor from one of her lovers, and being a loan to Mme. Beauharnais from Barras. She had thin brown hair, a complexion neither fresh nor faded, expressive eyes, a small retrousse nose, a pretty mouth, and a voice that charmed all listeners. She was rather undersized, but her figure ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... be impossible for me to tell you; he swung his arms like a country actor in a village barn, and declared that if he were not killed at Saumur, he would carry me away in spite of all that my friends ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... expressiveness these two superb frescoes have probably never been surpassed. The painter aims at no very delicate meanings, but he drives certain gross ones home so effectively that for a parallel to his process one must look to the art of the actor, the emphasising "point"-making mime. Some of his female figures are superb—they represent creatures of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... large brewery, but he soon left that and went on the stage. He seems to have remained in 'the profession' for some years, touring about this country and making occasional visits to America. The life seemed to suit him and I believe he was decidedly successful as an actor. But suddenly he left the stage and blossomed out in connection with ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... said the King, "and too fond of my comfort; besides, I have no longer any ambition. When an actor once realises that he will never be a Charles Kean or a Macready, then come peace and the enjoyment of life. Now, with you it is different: you are, if I may say so in deep affection, young and foolish. Your project is a most hare-brained scheme. You are throwing away all ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... It was not for lack of language; they used the strongest words they could find. But there was missing the subtile somewhat of intonation and gesture that actors call sincerity. Marie Louise knew how hard it is even for a great actor to express his simplest thoughts with conviction. No, it was when he expressed them best that he was least convincing, since an emotion that can be adequately presented is not a very big emotion; ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... At the same time Vulcan of sovereign fires, Where imperishable shields and swords were beaten out From spirits tempered in heaven. Look in the crystal! See how he hastens on To the place where his path comes up to the path Of a child of Plutarch and Shakespeare. O Lincoln, actor indeed, playing well your part, And Booth, who strode in a mimic play within the play, Often and often I saw you, As the cawing crows winged their way to the wood Over my house-top at solemn sunsets, ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... repertoire of weird, uncanny cries all its own — a power of throwing its voice, like a human ventriloquist, into unexpected corners of the thicket or meadow. In addition to its extraordinary vocal feats, it can turn somersaults and do other clown-like stunts as well as any variety actor ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... had vanished there—my little things from home—my last book. I liked to go there on auction days, to look on, and rejoice each time my books seemed likely to fall into good hands. Magelsen, the actor, had my watch; I was almost proud of that. A diary, in which I had written my first small poetical attempt, had been bought by an acquaintance, and my topcoat had found a haven with a photographer, to be used in the studio. So there was ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... be easily duped, Evelyn, for with all my heart I believed that that man loved me as deeply as I loved him. Every word—every look! Oh, he was a finished actor! It all ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... assassination was indispensable. In one of the clubs of Rome the Socialists selected by lot the assassins who should bear a hand in the murder of the minister. The wretched man who was appointed to be the principal actor in the deed of blood actually practised on a dead body in one of the hospitals. The day on which Parliament was summoned to meet, 15th November, was to see the full purpose of the faction carried into effect. As almost always occurs in such cases, warnings reached the ears of the ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Harding did for me—a version of Wilkie Collins's story—The Yellow Mask—devilish good it is, too. I was reading it the other day. We might take a company out with it. Let me see, whom could we get to play in it?' And, sitting over his portmanteau, the actor proceeded to cast the piece, commenting as he went along on the qualifications of the artists, and giving verbal sketches of the characters in the play. 'Beaumont would play Virginie first rate, you know—a strong, determined, wicked woman, who stops at nothing. I'd like to play ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... unconscious gravity which is so appealing to ladies. He looked (they thought) as though he had been touched—but Oh so lightly!—by poetic sorrow or strange experience: to ask him the way to the notion counter was as much of an adventure as to meet a reigning actor at a tea. The faint cloud of melancholy that shadowed his brow may have been only due to the fact that his new boots were pinching painfully; but ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... there was something apologetic and deprecating about the man. As he came up, still sheltering his eyes, as though from the surprise of Kitty's loveliness, and not the fire, he had the bearing of a modest actor called before the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... movement somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus. It is because the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing in turn the different photographs of the scene to continue each other, that each actor of the scene recovers his mobility; he strings all his successive attitudes on the invisible movement of the film. The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... away, and a chaffing of old BILL, who's much younger than him, like anythink. So I naterally arsked him how he acounted for his good sperrits. And what was his arnser? Why, hurly training. His Father was a Comic Play Actor, and allers ready for a larf, and offen took yung TOM with him to the Theater till he becum quite a favrite with all the merry gals there, who used to pet him, and give him sweets, and teach him to say all sorts of funny things; and, when he was old ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... balcony of the theatre Where the seats cost twenty-five cents, A slim little girl in a shiny serge frock, And a boy with a wistful mouth Are holding hands. And as they listen, breathlessly, to the studied voice of the actor, Their fingers are all a-thrill, With the music ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... with his curls like Bacchus, he now stood before me for an instant, the perfect master of himself, smiling with airs of conscious popularity and insufferable condescension. He reminded me at once of a royal duke, or an actor turned a little elderly, and of a blatant bagman who should have been the illegitimate son of a gentleman. A moment after he was gliding noiselessly on the road ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good fortune ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... your countenance for every event that may happen, for an ambassador, who is nothing but an actor, should be that greatest of actors, a philosopher; and with the leave of wise men (that is, hypocrites), philosophy I hold to be little more than presence of mind now undoubtedly preparation is a prodigious ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... of cloth and silk, which I cut out myself and sewed. My mother regarded it as good exercise preparatory to my becoming a tailor, and took up the idea that I certainly was born for it. I, on the contrary, said that I would go to the theatre and be an actor, a wish which my mother most sedulously opposed, because she knew of no other theatre than those of the strolling players and the rope-dancers. No, a tailor I must and should be. The only thing which in ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... is not necessary to prove that the individual accused was a direct, personal actor in the violence. If he was present, directing, aiding, abetting, counselling, or countenancing it, he is in law guilty of the forcible act. Nor is even his personal presence indispensable. Though he be absent at the time of its actual perpetration, yet, if he directed the act, devised, or knowingly ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... a portion of our history hitherto very obscure. Those magnificent regions were revealed to the world through a series of daring enterprises, of which the motives and even the incidents have been but partially and superficially known. The chief actor in them wrote much, but printed nothing; and the published writings of his associates stand wofully in need of interpretation from the unpublished documents which exist, but which have not heretofore been used as material ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Cibber[754], and thought him ignorant of the principles of his art. Garrick, Madam, was no declaimer; there was not one of his own scene-shifters who could not have spoken To be, or not to be, better than he did[755]; yet he was the only actor I ever saw, whom I could call a master both in tragedy and comedy[756]; though I liked him best in comedy. A true conception of character, and natural expression of it, were his distinguished excellencies." ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... sense of power itself in the national mind forbids the exhibition of its strength in tranquil times. It is lofty and fastidious; it will not stoop to a contest in which nothing is to be contended for. It is not an actor; and it cannot adopt the figured passion of the actor, rend its robe, and flourish, and obtest heaven against the traitor and the oppressor, to the sound of an orchestra, or in the glitter of stage lamps. The true ability of the empire must scorn all mimic encounter; and what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... company had already been assembled for some little time at the breakfast-table, Raisky entered. He felt that he was playing the role of an actor, fresh to the place, making his first appearance on the provincial stage after the most varying reports had been spread ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... all, if we eliminate Dr. Johnson, the lover of letters gives the second place, not to Miss Seward and her circle, but to David Garrick. Lichfield contains more than one memento of that great man. The actor's art is a poor sort of thing as a rule. Johnson, in his tarter moments, expresses this attitude, as when he talked of Garrick as a man who exhibited himself for a shilling, when he called him 'a futile fellow,' and implied that it was very unworthy ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... his [Greek: polupraguoshinae], which, being interpreted, means having a finger in every pie. We are used to consider him as a man of letters; but the greater part of his life was spent in labors of quite another kind. He was more actor than writer. He wrote only for occasions, at the instigation of others, or to meet some pressing demand of the time. Besides occupying himself with mechanical inventions, some of which (in particular, his improvement of Pascal's Calculating Machine) were quite famous in their day,—besides ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the words thou hast just spoken have found a lodgment in mine ears. Thy charge, truly, is Mitsunaka; but Mitsunaka's son is mine. This, if any, is a great occasion, and my years point to me as of right the chief actor in it. Be quick! be quick! strike off my head, and show it to Mitsunaka[165] as the head of my ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... You would make an excellent actor. Anyone on earth, looking at you this evening and not knowing the truth, would have thought you were dying of mortification and terror—you shook ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... will not be like a real radio broadcast if you do so, and, furthermore, you will not want to, since you will each have a copy of the book in your hands. All you will need to do is to remember that you are taking the part of a radio actor, that you are to read your speeches very distinctly, and that by your voice you will make your audience understand how you feel. In this way you will have the fun of living through some of the great ...
— The Landing of the Pilgrims • Henry Fisk Carlton
... built, his bones were small and finely jointed, his features chiseled with classic regularity—later on his lips might grow coarse, but as yet they were merely full. The chief characteristic of his expression was its mobility, but it was the mobility of an actor who knows every emotion that the muscles of a face can command. Sansevero's face, also changeable as an April day, was the spontaneous expression of unconscious mood. Giovanni was of a type to smile sweetly when most angry, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... who lives only with gentlemen. To be a man of the world, we must view that world in every grade and in every perspective. In short, the most practical art of wisdom is that which extracts from things the very quality they least appear to possess; and the actor in the world, like the actor on the stage, should find 'a basket-hilted sword very convenient to carry milk in.' [See the witty inventory of a player's goods in the "Tatler."] As for me, I have survived my relations ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was visible of the face was the colour of old parchment. A strange, wild, haughty-looking creature! Swithin observed his clothes with some displeasure—they were the clothes of a journalist or strolling actor. And yet he was impressed. This was singular. How could he be impressed by a fellow in such clothes! The man reached out a hand, covered with black hairs, and took up a tumbler that contained a dark-coloured fluid. 'Brandy!' thought Swithin. The crash of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... suppose, because I ran away to act, that I wasn't an honest woman?" She stretched out her left hand; and there was a thin gold ring on her third finger. "He isn't much of an actor, poor dear. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he has been hissed off two-and-thirty stages in Great Britain alone. Indeed, he's the very worst actor I ever saw, although I don't tell him. But ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... too, I used to go to the fairs when I had the money, and you know that if a peasant goes in for being a sportsman, or a horse-dealer, it's good-bye to the plough. Once the spirit of freedom has taken a man you will never root it out of him. In the same way, if a gentleman goes in for being an actor or for any other art, he will never make an official or a landowner. You are a woman, and you do not understand, but one must ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Lee sent all his disposable troops to the rescue, but the Federal fire was so terrible as to disconsert the coolest veterans. Whole ranks of the Confederate troops were hurled to the ground. Says an actor in the conflict: 'The thunder of cannon, the cracking of musketry from thousands of combatants, mingled with the screams of the wounded and dying, were terrific to the ear ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... no right to suppose that the Maid took the position of the chief actor in the pageant and stood alone by the side of Charles, as the exigencies of the pictorial art have required her to do. When, however, the ceremony was completed, and he had received on his knees the anointing which separated him as king from every other class of men, and ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... Their manner of living was simple and frugal. Like the Greek, the Roman had his games. He enjoyed chariot-races, but used slaves or freedmen as drivers. He also went to the theater, although he thought it unworthy of a Roman to be an actor. Such an occupation was ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... same way that admiration which all feel for acts of self-denial done for the good of others, and tending even towards the destruction of the actor, could hardly be accounted for on Darwinian principles alone; for self-immolators must but rarely leave direct descendants, while the community they benefit must by their destruction tend, so far, to {193} morally deteriorate. But ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... moment, and at a single blow severs it from the body. He is then closed with by another, who leaps across the prostrate foe, and with an adroit cut rips him open from snout to tail, and the tragedy is over, so far as the struggles and sufferings of the principal actor are concerned. There always follows, however, the most lively curiosity on the part of the sailors to learn what the shark has got stowed away in his inside; but they are often disappointed, for the ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... said with all the assurance and cheerfulness he could command. But she instinctively detected a slight shade of anxiety or uncertainty in his tone. The physician must be a consummate actor who can deceive a patient whose perceptions are preternaturally acute as were Feodora's. He saw that he had not ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... another curious speciment there; a tall thin feller, with one o' them lean, chinny faces. He claimed 'at he had been a show actor, but his lungs had given out—claimed he was a tragudian, but Great Scott! he ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... town sooner than he dared hope, well disguised, in a caravan of strangers not of Ben Raana's tribe. In that case the Agha of Djazerta would have no right to search among the women. And Manoeel's splendid at disguise. His actor's training has ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... your Uncle Sylvester at all!" said Marie vivaciously. "It's some trick that Gabriel is playing upon us. And he's not even a good actor—he forgets his part." ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... supposed to be written or related by the chief actor in the occurrences arising out of the "Haunted House." The author has thrown the narrative into this form, as he hopes it will vary the style of the traditions, and probably give more character and interest to the events ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... imagination, invention, fantasy; but his palette is his own. He is a master of gray tones, and his scale is, as Duret justly observes, a very intense one. He avoids the anecdote, historic or domestic. He detests design, prearranged composition. His studio is an open field, light the chief actor of his palette. He is never conventionally decorative unless you can call his own particular scheme decorative. He paints what he sees without flattery, without flinching from any ugliness. Compared with him Courbet is as sensuous ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... so strong a sense had she of the dignified position which she had at last attained in life. Even our Becky had her weaknesses, and as one often sees how men pride themselves upon excellences which others are slow to perceive: how, for instance, Comus firmly believes that he is the greatest tragic actor in England; how Brown, the famous novelist, longs to be considered, not a man of genius, but a man of fashion; while Robinson, the great lawyer, does not in the least care about his reputation in Westminster Hall, but believes ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bottle, applied its contents, and then to bed again, getting up in the morning without knowing any thing about it. Which, indeed, was a most mysterious occurrence; and it was still more mysterious, how the engraver came to know an event, of which the actor himself was ignorant, and where ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... surcharged with honeyed wonder. "How did he learn such marv'lous, MARV'LOUS imitations of darlin' Flopit? He ought to go on the big, big stage and be a really actor, oughtn't he, darlin' Flopit? He could make milyums and milyums of dollardies, couldn't ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... well enough when one can be as great as he, but is not all the world holds. I am sure that massive head of his was not hammered so square and broad by the great hands that forge the thunderbolts of nations, merely that he should be a tenor and an actor, and give pleasure to his fellow-men. I see there the power and the strength of a broader mastery than that which bends the ears of a theatre audience. One day we may see it. It needs the fire of hot times to fuse the elements of greatness in the crucible of revolution. There is not ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... very well. At the exception by a one's self, who had land very much hir's part. It want to have not any indulgence towards the bat buffoons. Have you seen already the new tragedy? They praise her very much. It is multitude already. Never I had seen the parlour so full. This actor he make very well her part. That piece is full of interest. It have wondered the spectadors. The curtains let ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... energy and of life. He acted better then than he had that day upon the terrace. But the sense of progress, the feeling that he was going to meet fate in the person of Salvatore, quickened the blood within him. At last the suspense would be over. At last he would be obliged to play not the actor but the man. He longed to be down by the sea. The youth in him rose up at the thought of action, and his last farewell to Hermione, looking down to him from the arch, was ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... that she knew I was hiding something from her. Because she knew me, and knew that I would not do such a thing lightly, she was terrified. She would lie there, gazing at me, with a dumb fear in her eyes—and I would go on asseverating blindly, like an unsuccessful actor before ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... be as good an actor as Mr. Hervey," said, Lady Delacour, "and if he suit 'the action to the word'—'the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... audible murmur came from the crowd, such as goes before the clapping of hands in a Roman theatre, a great upheaval of the heart of the audience to the actor who has ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn: While round the armed bands, Did clap ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... name, the other the king in reality." Gaveston's vanity was touched by the sullen hostility of the earls. He returned their suspicion by an openly expressed contempt. He amused himself and the king by devising nicknames for them. Thomas of Lancaster was the old pig or the play-actor, Aymer of Pembroke was Joseph the Jew, Gilbert of Gloucester was the cuckoo, and Guy of Warwick was the black dog of Arden. Such jests were bitterly resented. "If he call me dog," said Warwick on hearing of the insult, "I will take care to bite ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... to use slang. Self-made persons are usually precise in their language; they rarely violate the written laws of society. Besides, his pronunciation of some words is so distinct that an idea crossed me once that he might be an actor. But then it is not uniformly distinct. I am sure that he has some object or occupation in life: he has not the air of an idler. Yet I have thought of all the ordinary professions, and he does not fit one of them. This is perhaps what makes ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... writes an actor to the Press, "are more difficult to move on Saturdays than on other days." This is not our experience. On a Saturday we have often withdrawn without any pressure after the first turn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... died a week before his brother-in-law, probably of the same epidemic. Joan Hart, his widow, survived till November 4, 1646. Their eldest son William was an actor. (See Royal Warrant, May 17, 1636; Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 129.) In William Hewitt's "Visits to Remarkable Places," 1839, he mentions Stratford and a boy whom he had noticed from his likeness to the poet. He turned out to be a descendant of his sister Joan Hart, and ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... Job, and said, "Oh, to be brought down to the grave in grief through the follies of an ungrateful child!" And Labouchere says that one of the four brothers of Shakespeare used to explain that he wasn't the play-actor who wrote "Hamlet" and "Othello," lest, mayhap, his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... this world have two relations in them: one to the actor, and one to the public. Honest business is more really a contribution to the public than it is to the manager of the business himself. Although it seems to the man, and generally to the community, that the active business man is a self-seeker, and ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... face was genuinely solemn, his voice trembled, his brow grew damp with unpleasant, memories; he seemed bent upon clearing his conscience once for all. But he succeeded only in convulsing his hearers. Women giggled, men wiped tears from their eyes and declared he was a consummate actor and the rarest, the most fantastic humorist they had ever listened to. They swore that Cuba had lost, in him, a peerless champion. When he had finished they cheered him loudly and the orchestra broke into ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... it, this was a common matter with many surgeons, and it might easily have been characteristic of Leaver himself, even though Burns had not remembered it. His own heart was thumping heavily in his breast, as it had never thumped when he had been the chief actor in the coming scene. ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... NICHOLAS. An Actor? O no, that's a Player; and our Parson rails again Players mightily, I can tell you, because they brought him drunk up'oth Stage once,—as he ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... that sin, which has been the source of all our sorrows. Now, however, that you have convinced me by showing that you know all about our bed (which no human being has ever seen but you and I and a single maidservant, the daughter of Actor, who was given me by my father on my marriage, and who keeps the doors of our room) hard of belief though I have been I can mistrust ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... better, but not act half so well, if it were all written in good English. It seems unreasonable to forbid an author to take advantage of any actor's peculiar abilities that may suit his convenience; and both Johnstone and Emery displayed abilities of the very first rate in the two characters they represented in "John Bull."—But to the author of "John Bull," whose genius may be animated ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... Hyacinthe, an actor celebrated for his repartees, will explain the archaeological value of the old gentleman, and the smile repeated like an echo by all eyes. Somebody once asked Hyacinthe where the hats were made that set the house in a roar as soon as he appeared. "I don't have them ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... delighted to see her old schoolfellow, Miss Tracy, who was a great favourite of hers," he said; "and many of my friends will be glad to see your son, who from your account was the principal actor in your adventure." ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... Queen of Scots, we are told, had gray eyes; and even she, poor lady, owned not more speaking or history-telling orbs than did this little unknown gossip in gray. But our attention was diverted from the contemplation, by the entrance of another actor on the stage, to whom Annie Mortimer darted forward with an exclamation of delight and welcome. The new-comer was a slender, elderly gentleman, whose white hairs, pale face, and benignant expression presented nothing remarkable in their aspect, beyond a certain air of elegance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... record we have of Shakespeare as an actor before Queen Elizabeth relates to the performance in Christmas week of this same year of "twoe severall comedies." This record in the Accounts of the Treasurer who paid out the money for the Plays acted before the ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... knowing the relation in which she stood to him; think of Dr. Johnson's friend, Mrs. Thrale, afterward Mrs. Piozzi, who at the age of eighty was full enough of life to be making love ardently and persistently to Conway, the handsome young actor. I can readily believe that Number Five will outlive the Tutor, even if he is fortunate enough rather in winning his way into the fortress through gates that open to him of their own accord. If he fails ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in foretaste the ragged parent who would come upon the camp fire of his son, picturesque and repentant, and dramatized the meeting, a lump in his throat. Emotionally it was complex to be actor and audience both. Thank God, he reflected, as he opened a closet door, dragged forth a battered multitude of bags and suit cases and began an impatient upheaval of bureau drawers, he was a man of action. When Garry entered a half hour later ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... story connected with this latter view which never failed to recur to my mind in my long gunning excursions upon Dedlow Marsh. Although the event was briefly recorded in the county paper, I had the story, in all its eloquent detail, from the lips of the principal actor. I cannot hope to catch the varying emphasis and peculiar coloring of feminine delineation, for my narrator was a woman; but I'll try to give at least ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... a peculiar position in society, and is a prominent actor in many scenes of which the general public can have no knowledge. In his breast may be locked the secrets of many men who stand in proud pre-eminence before the public, and who are admired and respected for the possession of virtues that are but the cloak with ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... of Ruth and Alice DeVere. Their father, a widower, is an actor who has taken up work for the "movies." Both girls wish to aid him in his work and visit various localities to act ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on an Auto Tour • Laura Lee Hope
... believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship, restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living English actor could ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... the ensign with a salute of twenty-one guns. After this impressive solemnity, Mr. Busby lived at the bay for six years. His career was a prolonged burlesque—a farce without laughter, played by a dull actor in serious earnest. Personally he went through as strange an experience as has often fallen to the lot of a British official. A man of genius might possibly have managed the inhabitants of his Alsatia. But governments have no right to expect genius in unsupported officials—even when they ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... audience would recognize him and there would be a scene. We had entered late, and there soon came on the scene where Hamlet soliloquizes over the skull of Yorick. The audience was perfectly still, endeavoring to comprehend the actor's words, when a soldier far back in the audience rose up and in a clear voice called out, as the actor held up the skull, "Say, pard, what is it, Yank or Reb?" The house appreciated the point and was instantly in an uproar, and General Grant said we had better leave, so we ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... temperament; they recoiled from its obscenity; and its constant appeals to the gods and goddesses of heathenism outraged their religious convictions. [321:1] In their estimation, the talent devoted to its maintenance was miserably prostituted; and whilst every actor was deemed unworthy of ecclesiastical fellowship, every church member was prohibited, by attendance or otherwise, from giving any encouragement to the stage. The early Christians were also forbidden to frequent the public shows, as they were considered scenes of temptation and pollution. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... victories and triumphs; after the battles of Tilsit, Austerlitz, and Jena, the humiliation of all Germany, the triumphal days of Erfurt, when the great imperial actor saw before him a whole "parterre of kings;" after a career of victory which endured ten years, Napoleon on the 22d of May, 1809, had sustained his first defeat, lost his first battle. True, he had made this victory cost dearly enough. There had been two days of blood and carnage ere the ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... here. I do not know how many pictures there are here by him, but a great quantity, it seems to me: Philips without number, in childhood, youth, and age; Dons with curled moustaches; Queens with large hoops and disfigured heads; an actor, full of life and character, one of his very best. But his greatest picture, and really a wonder, is his portrait of himself painting the little Infanta, who is in the foreground of the picture with two young ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... his labor on the following morning; and then, while the others worked on the scenery, he related to them the success he should make as an actor, provided he was given a part which admitted of his ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... follows without vacillation, though very slowly, the road leading to its last transformation, when, reaching its aim at last, it becomes a Divine Being. They not only contribute to the reaching of this goal, but without these finite breaks Sutratma-Buddhi could never reach it. Sutratma is the actor, and its numerous and different incarnations are the actor's parts. I suppose you would not apply to these parts, and so much the less to their costumes, the term of personality. Like an actor the soul is bound to play, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... hitherto so little troubled its head with the points of doctrine held by a community which contributes in other ways so largely to its amusement, that, before the late mischance of a celebrated tragic actor, it scarce condescended to look into the practice of any individual player, much less to inquire into the hidden and abscondite springs of his actions. Indeed, it is with some violence to the imagination that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the lenity of the magistrates of Antioch,) et majorem ecclesiam Antiochiae claudi. This interdiction was performed with some circumstances of indignity and profanation; and the seasonable death of the principal actor, Julian's uncle, is related with much superstitious complacency by the Abbe de la Bleterie. Vie de Julien, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... and conversation. A stage, decked out with the remains of former spoil, exhibited "the forty thieves," or a comedy of judges, officers, and felons: mock charges were enforced by barristers, arrayed in blankets; the bench was filled with an actor decorated with a quilt, while a swab covered his head, and descended to his shoulders. In the female prison ships, dancing and concerts, at which the cabin passengers were spectators, whiled away the voyage. The ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... kindly gentleness is but a fancy vain! Thy charms that they can match the olea or orchid, but thoughts inane! While an actor will, envious lot! with fortune's smiles be born, A youth of noble birth will, strange to say, be luckless ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that comes with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... George Daly and Luke Fox; Toler contributed his farce, and Dr. Duigenan his fanaticism. Through the long hours of the winter's night the eloquent war was vigorously maintained. One who was himself a distinguished actor in the struggle, (Sir Jonah Barrington,) has thus described it: "Every mind," he says, "was at its stretch, every talent was in its vigour: it was a momentous trial; and never was so general and so deep a sensation ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... a question that we can see nowhere else, and for an hour Mr. Glow and King and Forbes, sipping their raspberry shrub in a retired corner of the bar-room, were interested spectators of the scene. Through the padded swinging doors entered, as in a play, character after character. Each actor as he entered stopped for a moment and stared about him, and in this act revealed his character-his conceit, his slyness, his bravado, his self-importance. There was great variety, but practically one prevailing type, and that the New York politician. Most of them were from the city, though ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... at his father's school. Another story is his fooling of a Jew merchant. He had high spirits, perhaps too high, for his slender physique. He was a facile mimic, and Liszt, Balzac, Bocage, Sand and others believed that he would have made an actor of ability. With his sister Emilia he wrote a little comedy. Altogether he was a clever, if not a brilliant lad. His letters show that he was not the latter, for while they are lively they do not reveal much literary ability. But their writer saw with open eyes, eyes that were disposed ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Tempest and Sir James Harrington of Brierley, near Barnesley, were concerned in the king's capture, and each received 100 marks reward; but the fact of Sir Thomas Talbot being the chief actor, is shown by his having received the larger reward ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various
... to her doubt and gloom, a tide of rich sweetness began to course through her heart and break in splendid expectation from her eyes, as they looked through the little unglazed window toward the fort. Nor had she long to wait. He came up the narrow wet street, striding like a tall actor in the height of a melodrama, his powerful figure erect as an Indian's, and his face glowing with the joy of a genuine, impatient lover, who is proud of himself because of the image he ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... and flung back skillfully and cleverly the ball of conversation, as he tossed it to her. She was pleased, it was evident, and amused. But she was pleased only as with a clever actor, a brilliant performer on some new instrument now heard for the first time. The gay, wild humor of the young man hit her fancy; his mad wit struck a kindred chord in her mind; but the latent poetry and romance passed unheeded, and the noblest point of all, the good and gracious feelings, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... Ford's Theater in Washington, and while he was sitting quietly in his box, an actor named John Wilkes Booth came in and shot him through the head, causing a wound from which the President died early next morning. His deed done, the assassin leaped from the box to the stage, and shouting, "Sic semper tyrannis" (So be it always to tyrants), the motto ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... London in his habit as he had lived. The old fellow stood there and just talked to the audience of a fine sporting class of men that petrol has driven from the streets, without exaggerated humor or pathos. Desmond, himself a born Cockney, at once fell under the actor's spell and found all memories of the front slipping away from him as the old London street characters succeeded one another on the stage. Then the orchestra blared out, the curtain descended, and the house broke into a great flutter ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... situation—to one of Lord Talgarth's temperament—demanded that the threats should be made, and that Frank should pretend to be crushed by them. That the boy should have behaved like this brought a reality of passion into the affair—disconcerting and infuriating—as if an actor should find his enemy on the stage was armed with a real sword. There was but one possibility left—which Lord Talgarth instinctively rather than consciously grasped at—namely, that an increased fury on his part should once more bring ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... science is classified knowledge; subjectively viewed, it is the laws or principles according to which knowledge is classified. Every actor implies an act—every thinker a thought. We may therefore universally make this dual classification, according as we view the mental operation involved, or the attributes of objects which form the subject of thought. The possibility of science is conditioned upon the possibility of classification. ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... the children of our love, and of the dangers of their defencelessness, and I marvelled with a weeping spirit at the manner in which I had been snatched up, and brought, as it were in a whirlwind, to be an actor in a scene of such inevitable woe. Sometimes, in the passion of that grief, I was tempted to rise, and moved to seek my way back to the nest of my affections. But as often as the thought came over my heart, with its soft and fond enticements, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... the street which she could see from her bench was empty, the dust settling, thinning, disappearing. Farther down toward the Casa Blanca she could imagine the little knots of men asking one another what had happened and how; the chief actor in this fragment of human drama she could picture lying inert, uncaring that it was for him that a bell had tolled and would toll again, that men ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... me she will hide her light under a bushel," he continued; "I being the bushel! Now I know you like me—you have certainly proved it. But you think I am frivolous and penniless and shabby! Granted—granted—a thousand times granted. I have been a loose fish—a fiddler, a painter, an actor. But there is this to be said: In the first place, I fancy you exaggerate; you lend me qualities I have n't had. I have been a Bohemian—yes; but in Bohemia I always passed for a gentleman. I wish you could see some of my old camarades—they would tell you! It was the liberty I liked, ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... we swaggering here? So near the cradle of the fairy queen? What, a play toward! I'll be an auditor; An actor, too, ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... reply, "Yes, we have seen that; my Peter and I—we are very happy." Thus Gretchen left her girlhood behind her. It was her habit, so Grundelheim tells us, to walk out in the forest with one Hans Breitel, an actor at the municipal theatre. He used to teach her to talk to the birds, and when she besought him ardently to tell her stories of the theatre, he would relate to her the parts he had nearly played. Gretchen's heart thrilled—oh ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... suppose such a paragon is desired by your friend? Who is he? What is he like, not an ordinary actor—" and the wondrous eyes darkened with a ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... sharp-eyed birds, with senses quickened by hunger, the true mother of invention, must learn at last to pierce such flimsy disguises, and suspect a stick insect in the most innocent-looking and apparently rigid twigs. The final step, therefore, consists in the production of that extraordinary actor, the Xeroxylus laceratus, whose formidable name means no more than 'ragged dry-stick,' and which really mimics down to the minutest particular a broken twig, overgrown with mosses, liverworts, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... about the year 1682. "Pierre and Jaffier," says Jackson, in his History of the Scottish Stage, "in the estimation of the theatrical world, are equal in rank, and excel each other in representation only, as the particular talents of the actor elevate or lessen, in the idea of the spectator, the importance of whichever part he assumes. I have seen Garrick and Barry alternately in both parts, and the candid critic was doubtful where to bestow the preference. Mr. Mossop, indeed, raised the character of Pierre ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... attachment to which had been judged the sole impediment to his advancement under the late reign to situations of power and trust corresponding with the opinion entertained of his integrity and political wisdom. A brief retrospect of the scenes of public life in which he had already been an actor will best explain the character and sentiments of this eminent person, destined to wield for more than forty years with unparalleled skill and felicity, under a mistress who knew his value, the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... reader acquainted circumstantially with three memorable cases of murder, which long ago the voice of amateurs has crowned with laurel, but especially with the two earliest of the three, viz., the immortal Williams' murders of 1812. The act and the actor are each separately in the highest degree interesting; and, as forty-two years have elapsed since 1812, it cannot be supposed that either is known circumstantially to the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... other than silver. The commodious court room was, despite the outer inclemency of road and weather, packed with men and women who stood up and yelled a welcome that for the moment dazed the impostor; but he recovered his nerve and mischievousness instantly, and no actor ever fell into his part more completely than did he. The Judge was ponderous, but Jimmy went him one better. The Judge "threw a chest" when he had an audience, but Jimmy swelled until his buttons strained. The Judge walked like the late Henry Irving playing Mathias in The Bells, but Jimmy's ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... conquerors by whom this great and holy enterprise was achieved. This is not a history of ancient nations, made up of vain reveries, and idle hearsays, but contains a true relation of events of which I was an actor and an eye-witness. Gomara received and wrote such accounts of these events as tended to enhance the fame and merit of Cortes exclusively, neglecting to make mention of our valiant captains and brave soldiers; and the whole tenor of his work shews his partiality to that family, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... witnessing at each rehearsal a different play. And steadily my manuscript was enriched with interlineations, to and beyond the verge of legibility, as steadily I substituted, for the speeches I had rewritten yesterday, the speeches which the actor (having perfectly in mind the gist but not the phrasing of what ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... no account extant of his family. He soon quitted the University, and became a player on the same stage with the incomparable Shakespear. He was accounted, says Langbaine, a very fine poet in his time, even by Ben Johnson himself, and Heywood his fellow-actor stiles him the best of poets. In a copy of verses called the Censure of the Poets, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... access of favor always excited in the mob by the presence and prestige of power. It was towards Greece and the East that a tendency was shown in the tastes and trips of Nero, imperial poet, musician, and actor. L. Verus, one of the military commandants in Belgica, had conceived a project of a canal to unite the Moselle to the Saone, and so the Mediterranean to the ocean; but intrigues in the province and the palace prevented its execution, and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... however, they were wont to assume an elaborate artificiality of speech and manner in communion with their friends, that was designed with each to point the moral of a complete indifference and forgetfulness. But the girl was by far the better actor; and not only did she play her own part convincingly, but she generally managed to show up in her rival that sense of mortification that it was his fond hope he was ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... scene with his daughter. If the dramatist had given him such another final chance as I have already suggested, the character might have been dramatically perfected in Mr. TREE'S hands. As it is, both by author and actor it is left "to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... simply unable to participate. Stuck in a room 800 feet from the ground with walls of glass that allowed observation of the whole island of Daem, which I assumed to be the only civilization in the world, while great events unfolded around me, of which I was supposed to be the primary actor, was very disconcerting, though I find in retrospect that fate worked so mysteriously in my situation that it is quite puzzling to think about, meaning, of course, my relationship with the doom of humanity as preventer and provoker, ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... and the summer season cut down the actor's year to forty weeks. From information which I was able to obtain from the Actor's Association, the average yearly income of an actor is L70. From this, L37 may be deducted for travelling and other expenses. For though the actual railway fare is usually ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... contain much that is undramatic is undoubtedly true, but it must be remembered that at the time he wrote, AEschylus found the drama in a very primitive state. The persons represented consisted of but a single actor, who related some narrative of mythological or legendary interest, and a chorus, who relieved the monotony of such a performance by the interspersing of a few songs and dances. To AEschylus belongs the credit ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... pageant glitter are worked up with great labour—perhaps with more than is looked for or will be appreciated in a novel. Still, they are creditable to the taste and research of the author. Occasionally, there are scenes of bold and stirring interest, just such as might be expected from an actor of Mr. Power's vivid stamp. The storm sketches towards the close of the second volume are even infinitely better than any of John Kemble's shilling waves or Mr. Farley's last scenes. In other portions of the work, bits of antiquarianism are so stuck on the pages as to perplex, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... Majesty to send him home in disgrace, and that the Queen had called him a fool, and quite unfit for his post. And as if this had not been mischief-making enough, in addition to the absurd De Loo and Bodman negotiations of the previous year, in which he had been the principal actor, he had crowned his absurdities by this secret and officious visit to Ghent. The Queen, naturally very indignant at this conduct, reprehended him severely, and ordered him back to England. The comptroller was wretched. He expressed his readiness to obey her commands, but nevertheless ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... this sentence with another of his grim smiles. The actor was deeply moved by it, for in that bitter smile he read how the artist pined for his country. 'I will stay with you, I will stay with you, dear David!' now eagerly cried Talma. 'For your sake, I will desert my post, and steal a holiday from my Paris friends; but it can only be ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... describe me, who can, An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man; As an actor, confess'd without rival to shine: 95 As a wit, if not first, in the very first line: Yet, with talents like these, and an excellent heart, The man had his failings, a dupe to his art. Like an ill-judging beauty, his colours he spread, And beplaster'd with rouge his own natural ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... be indefinitely delayed, the Monkey has indeed advanced by one poor step towards the civic equality which is his right, and has appeared as an actor upon the boards of our music-halls. It should surely be a sufficient rebuke for those who continue to sneer at the Simian League and such devoted pioneers as Miss Greeley and Lady Wayne that the Monkey has been honourably admitted and has done first-rate work in a profession ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... rivalry between two leading theatres, that culminated in a great riot, occurred. Edwin Forrest, the great tragedian of that day, and many a year later, and Macready, a celebrated English actor, seemed almost pitted against each other in the same play, Hamlet. A certain party coming into existence had taken for its watchword Americanism of a rather narrow sort, and was protesting against all foreign influence. Macready had played, and then gone to ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... a mine: she knew by heart All Calderon and greater part of Lope, So that if any actor miss'd his part She could have served him for the prompter's copy; For her Feinagle's were an useless art, And he himself obliged to shut up shop—he Could never make a memory so fine as That which adorn'd the brain of ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... by one impulse, every actor in the weird scene stopped short in response to a signal given by the huge leader, who threw up his arms just when the fire, fanned so strangely by the hundreds of figures sweeping round it, tore upward ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... But another actor in the late adventures expressed his willingness to be of the party, and tore off at full speed one morning when, well provided with candles, matches and magnesium wire, they started off, following the edge of the cliff, till, about a mile west of the ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... well-known actor, then recently deceased, and more conspicuous for his professional skill than for his private virtues, was discussed. 'We shall never,' remarked some ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... representation of a real Colonel, but the scene in which he attacked and routed LINDLEY MURRAY, went extremely well. Mr. JERRAM as a singing journalist, was admirable. We cannot help wondering why so remarkable an actor should confine himself to the provincial stage. We had almost forgotten to mention that the part of The Candidate was, on this occasion, assigned to a Mr. RICHARD PATTLE, a complete novice, whose evident nervousness seriously ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... the question for a jury to determine is, whether the accused be guilty, or not guilty. Guiltis a personal quality of the actor, not necessarily involved in the act, but depending also upon the intent or motive with which the act was done. Consequently, the jury must find that he acted from a criminal motive, before they can declare ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... consider another "miracle" discovered in the plays,—a miracle if the actor be the author. The new portent is the courtliness and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies make the coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen and ladies in the plays. To be sure the refinement in the jests is often conspicuously ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... to be natural, of necessity one becomes the reverse of natural. A clever actor,—or more frequently a clever actress,—will assume the appearance; but the very fact of the assumption renders the reality impossible. Lady Chiltern was generally very clever in the arrangement of all little social difficulties, and, had ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... No. 17 the newspapers would soon be getting hold of it. The arrest of Len Shi by Furneaux must be reported. Possibly some newspaper correspondent in Eastbourne would hear of the kidnaping exploit, and describe the Eastern aspect of its chief actor, Mrs. Forbes's name would "transpire" in the paragraph, and, by putting two and two together the lynx-eyed journalism of London would ferret out a good deal of ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... ever"—these multitudes of living beings, angelic, diabolic, bestial, human, crowd the huge spaces of the chapel walls. What makes the impression of controlling doom the more appalling, is that we comprehend the drama in its several scenes, while the chief actor, the divine Judge, at whose bidding the cherubs sound their clarions, and the dead arise, and weal and woe are portioned to the saved and damned, is Himself unrepresented.[210] We breathe in the presence of embodied ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... without demur. He had the clean-shaven, wrinkled face of the comedian; his black eyes sparkled with an active intelligence; an expressive mouth bespoke clear and fluent speech; his quick, alert movements were those of the mimetic actor. Winter stood six feet in height, and weighed two hundred and ten pounds; Furneaux was six inches shorter and eighty pounds lighter. The one was a typical John Bull, the other a Channel Islander of pure French descent, and never did more ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... naturally emit harsh and disagreeable tones; yet this great poet and critic thought that this imitation of nature would cost too much, if purchased at the expense of disagreeable sensations, or, as he expresses it, of "splitting the ear." The poet and actor, as well as the painter of genius who is well acquainted with all the variety and sources of pleasure in the mind and imagination, has little regard or attention to common nature, or creeping after common sense. By overleaping those narrow bounds, he more effectually seizes the whole mind, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... foundation of fact, and screened by an outward semblance of realism, there is erected the most laughable superstructure of fantastic farce. I remember hearing one of the two great comedians of the Theatre Francais, M. Coquelin, praise a comic actor of the Varietes whom we had lately seen in a rather cheap and flimsy farce, because he combined "la verite la plus absolue avec la fantasie la plus pure." And this is the merit of La Boule: its most humorous inventions have their roots ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... word, are not inferior to you in culture, though you won't believe it. They can contemplate such depths of belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems that they are within a hair's-breadth of being 'turned upside down,' as the actor ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... The fire, being the male influence, would assimilate with and act as an antidote upon the mephitic smoke, which was a female influence.[36] Besides this, as a further charm to exorcise the portent, the dance called Sambaso, which is still performed as a prelude to theatrical exhibitions by an actor dressed up as a venerable old man, emblematic of long life and felicity, was danced on a plot of turf in front of the Temple Kofukuji. By these means the smoke was dispelled, and the drama was originated. The story is ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... in two volumes. Being yet present with them He spoke and acted. Being exalted He 'speaketh from heaven,' and from the throne carries on the endless series of His works of power and healing. The whole history is shaped by the same conviction. Everywhere 'the Lord' is the true actor, the source of all the life which is in the Church, the arranger of all the providences which affect its progress. The Lord adds to the Church daily. His name works miracles. To the Lord believers are added. His angel, His Spirit, bring messages to His servants. He appears to Paul, and speaks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... had always aspired to be an actor. One of the first things he did after settling in Sandusky was to organize an amateur theatrical company, composed entirely of people of German birth or descent. The performances were given in the Turner Hall, in the German tongue, on a makeshift ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... only great in the light of the actor's previous history and training; and perhaps the atonement Teddy now contemplated was for him as heroic as that of the martyred bishop who held the hand that had signed the recantation steadily in the flame ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... against which the Contessa wove her web of smiles and humorous schemes was both dark and serious. There were many shadows behind that frivolous central light. Herself the chief actor, the plotter, she to whom only it could be a matter of personal advantage, was perhaps the least serious of all the agents in it. The others thought of possibilities dark enough, of perhaps the destruction of family peace in this house which had been so hospitable to ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... were so real that they startled me; yet, knowing what a consummate actor he was, I restrained both my fear and my sympathy, and waited for him to enlighten me further. He sat with his head bowed, and his hands hanging down, in an attitude of profound despondency, so different from his usual jaunty air, that every ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... their teachers could not really have given them. The teachers did not understand that each vowel represented not two sounds only, a long and a short, but many more. This fact was no more understood by John Walker, the actor and lexicographer, who in 1798 published a Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek and Latin proper names. His general rule was wrong as a general rule, and so far as it agreed with facts it was useless. ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... good-nature) he had even gone the length of asking a publisher to dine at his club. And here he was seated in an actress's room, alone, while his sister was inspecting powder-puffs, washes, patches, and paste jewelry; and not only that, but they were about to take an actor home to supper with them. What he thought about it all he never said. He sat and stroked his small yellow moustache; his eyes was absent; and on his handsome, almost Greek, features there dwelt ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... festival drew near. The whole business of dramatic representation was in the hands of public bodies—the Mayor and Corporation, if the town could boast of such. Later years saw the appearance of the professional actor, by more humble designation termed a strolling player. Many small companies—four or five men and perhaps a couple of boys—came into existence, wandering over England to win the pence and applause guaranteed by the immense popularity of their entertainments. ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... India, and the mulatto strain of Alexander Hamilton. In music and art we recall Bridgewater, the friend of Beethoven, and the unexplained complexion of Beethoven's own father; Coleridge-Taylor in England, Tanner in America, Gomez in Spain; Ira Aldridge, the actor, and Johnson, Cook, and Burleigh, who are making the new American syncopated music. In the Church we know that Negro blood coursed in the veins of many of the Catholic African fathers, if not in certain of the popes; and there were in modern days ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... long been at such a height that hardly any exploit could increase it. And yet an exploit was at hand at which, even when Bayard was the actor of it, all France and Germany were to stand ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... search she meets with amazing adventures, which she describes in a series of letters to her governess. She changes her name to Cherubina de Willoughby, and journeys to London, where, mistaking Covent Garden Theatre for an ancient castle, she throws herself on the protection of a third-rate actor, Grundy. He readily falls in with her humour, assuming the name of Montmorenci, and a suit of tin armour and a plumed helmet for her delight. Later, Cherubina is entertained by Lady Gwyn, who, for the amusement of her guests, heartlessly ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... you. There was something more in it than wonder—something more than dismay, even—at the success of his unhallowed experiment. It was as though, having prepared himself light-heartedly to witness a play, he was seized and terrified to find himself the principal actor. I never saw ghastlier fear on ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to peruse the seneschal's simple narrative without profound interest. In reading his account of this disastrous expedition, we are transported, in imagination, to the thirteenth century, and witness, with the mind's eye, the scenes in which he was an actor, and gradually come to feel as if we were not reading a chronicle penned centuries ago, but listening to a Crusader who, just returned from the East, and seated on the dais of the castle hall, tells his story over the wine-cup to his kinsmen and ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... artillery and musketry as threw them into disorder. Gen. Lee sent all his disposable troops to the rescue, but the Federal fire was so terrible as to disconsert the coolest veterans. Whole ranks of the Confederate troops were hurled to the ground. Says an actor in the conflict: 'The thunder of cannon, the cracking of musketry from thousands of combatants, mingled with the screams of the wounded and dying, were terrific to the ear ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... Bawd: Then made by Art a Swearer of Renown, Nurst and embrac'd by th'Heir of Judahs Crown: Encourag'd too by Pension for Reward, With his forg'd Scrowls for Guiltless Blood prepared. Poor Engine for a greatness so sublime: } But oh, a Cause by which their Baal must climb, } Ennobles both the Actor and ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... he spoke, he again proceeded: "Courage can do much in war, and is in all cases a noble trait, which I for one do ever respect; but there may be circumstances where manly courage can avail nothing, and where to practice it only becomes fool-hardy, and is sure to draw down certain destruction on the actor or actors. Such I hasten to assure you, gentlemen, is exactly your case in the present instance. No one admires the heroism which you have, one and all, even to your women and children, this day displayed, more than myself; but I feel it my duty ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... although not of notable compass, was an absolute tenor of a delicious quality and great power. His vocalization was unexceptionably pure, and his style was manly and noble. As a dramatic singer I never heard his equal except Ronconi; as an actor, I never saw his equal, except Ronconi, Rachel, and Salvini. He had in perfection that power which Hamlet speaks of in his soliloquy, after he dismisses the players, when the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... more solemn; for a new actor, whose role was to be short though terrible, now appeared upon it. It was a man, whom by his dress the three recognised with terror as a white man like themselves. The unlucky man suddenly discovered in one of the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... of the Bible to accept its utterances indiscriminately as the words of God, to quote every saying of every speaker in its pages, or every deed of every actor in its histories as expressing to us the ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... there hung a wan sweetness like a fine mist, almost an ethereality in that light; yet in the pale face lurked something reckless, something of the actor, too; and though his smile was gentle and wistful, there was a twinkle behind it, not seen at first, something amused and impish; a small surprise underneath, like a ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... or to see them getting attention he craved for himself. He could no sing, but he was a great story teller. Had he just said, out and out, that he was making up tales, 'twould have been all richt enough. But, no—Jock must pretend he'd been everywhere he told about, and that he'd been an actor in every yarn he spun. He was a great boaster, too—he'd tell us, without a blush, of the most desperate things he'd done, and of how brave he'd been. He was the bravest man alive, to ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... the universal joy was changed into universal sorrow, for a shocking thing happened. Five days after Lee's surrender, Lincoln went with his wife and friends to see a play at Ford's Theatre, in Washington. In the midst of the play, a Southern actor, John Wilkes Booth, who was familiar with the theatre, entered the President's box, shot him in the back of the head, jumped to the stage, and rushed through the wings to the street. There he mounted a horse in waiting for him and escaped, soon, however, to be hunted down and killed ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... other the king in reality." Gaveston's vanity was touched by the sullen hostility of the earls. He returned their suspicion by an openly expressed contempt. He amused himself and the king by devising nicknames for them. Thomas of Lancaster was the old pig or the play-actor, Aymer of Pembroke was Joseph the Jew, Gilbert of Gloucester was the cuckoo, and Guy of Warwick was the black dog of Arden. Such jests were bitterly resented. "If he call me dog," said Warwick on hearing ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... in the commonwealth," Phillips is in error. Milton's name does not occur in the Act. Pope used to tell that Davenant had employed his interest to protect a brother-poet, thus returning a similar act of generosity done to himself by Milton in 1650. Pope had this story from Betterton the actor. How far Davenant exaggerated to Betterton his own influence or his exertions, we cannot tell. Another account assigns the credit of the intervention to Secretary Morris and Sir Thomas Clarges. After ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... much in Seymour himself as well as in his words to attract the attention of the convention.[995] Added years gave him a more stately, almost a picturesque bearing, while a strikingly intelligent face changed its expression with the ease and swiftness of an actor's. This was never more apparent than now, when he turned, abruptly, from the alleged sins of Republicans to the alleged virtues of Democrats. Relaxing its severity, his countenance wore a triumphant smile as he declared in a ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... was placed on the right of the Crucifix, St. John the Evangelist being invariably on the left. I am speaking here of the crucifix as a wholly ideal and mystical emblem of our faith in a crucified Saviour; not of the crucifixion as an event, in which the Virgin is an actor and spectator, and is usually fainting in the arms of her attendants. In the ideal subject she is merely an ideal figure, at once the mother of Christ, and the personified Church. This, I think, is evident from those very ancient carvings, and examples in stained glass, in which ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... hired a show-actor, looks like." Dirk confided behind his hand to Shorty McGuire. "That's real singin', if yuh ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... which had been for the most part deserted, and there we were cantoned, chiefly in empty houses. Whilst we were here, a very interesting piece of excitement took place, in which one of the officers of our company, a lieutenant, was the chief actor. He was an Irishman, and being likewise a Catholic, had been in the habit whilst staying at our late quarters of visiting a Catholic chapel; and there he had seen and fallen in love with a Portuguese general's daughter. Correspondence and ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... coarse and idealistic; and at once feebly the slave of his times, and so boldly, spontaneously innovating as to be quite unconscious of innovation: the mixed nature, or rather the nature in many heterogeneous bits, of the man of letters who is artistic almost to the point of being an actor, natural in every style because morally connected with no style at all. The man was Lorenzo di Piero dei Medici, for whom posterity has exclusively reserved the civic title of all his family and similar town despots, calling ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... map of Europe, to see where the place was, and then said with a sigh: "Roll up that map: it will not be wanted these ten years." One version assigns the incident to Shockerwick House, near Bath. Pitt is looking over the picture gallery, and is gazing at Gainsborough's portrait of the actor Quin. His retentive memory calls up the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... wears a huge grotesque scarlet mask on his head, and at times makes this monster appear to stretch out and draw in its neck by an unseen change in position of the mask from the head to the gradually extended and draped hand of the actor. The beat of a drum and the whistle of a bamboo flute formed the accompaniment ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... Anne, and the door opened to admit the eminent actor, who looked bigger and handsomer than ever in his long coat ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... and leaned her head upon her hand, while the scenes in which she had been for the past few hours an actor, passed before her in review with almost the vividness of reality. Were her thoughts pleasant ones? We fear not; for every now and then a faint sigh troubled her breast, and parted her too firmly closed lips. The evening's entertainment had not satisfied her in something. There was a ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... notwithstanding the usual supineness and divisions of the Allied Powers, have led to their obtaining signal success in the next campaign, had not their attention been, early in spring, arrested, and their efforts paralyzed by a new and formidable actor on the theatre of affairs. This was no less a man than CHARLES XII. KING OF SWEDEN; who, after having defeated the coalition of the northern sovereigns formed for his destruction, dictated peace to Denmark at Copenhagen, dethroned ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... chief actor entered, a powerful black bull with sharp horns and fiercely glistening eyes. He had been in a room with holes in the ceiling through which he had been poked with pointed sticks. He was, therefore, tolerably ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... compliments there: on which occasion, we regret to say, Marechal de Maillebois was not so reverent to the Imperial Majesty as he should have been. Angry belike at the Adventure now forced on him, and harassed with many things; seeing in the Imperial Majesty little but an unfortunate Play-actor Majesty, who lives in furnished lodgings paid for by France, and gives France and Maillebois an infinite deal of trouble to little purpose. Certain it is, he addressed the Imperial Majesty in the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... reminded them of those they had always known. So they gave those the same names. A Khatkan lion is furred, it is a hunter and a great fighter, but it is not the cat of Terra. However, it is in great demand as a tri-dee actor. So we summon it out of lurking by providing free meals. One shoots a poli, a water rat, or a landeer and drags the carcass behind a low-flying flitter. The lion springs upon the moving meat, which it can also scent, and the rope is ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... of high office never can be. Dickens could only write of natural people, so he wrote of common men: 'You will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial traveller like Micawber; you will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks like Swiveller; you will find him as an unsuccessful actor like Crumples; you will find him as an unsuccessful doctor like Sawyer; you will always find the rich and reeking personality where Dickens found it among ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... his mother say? She, who all her life had spurned the play-actor as she would a reptile. And she was right, Will saw that clearly; there was a sorcery about such people against which ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... -satura- with the drama thence developed, is not at all tenable. The difference between the -histrio- and the Atellan player was just about as great as is at present the difference between a professional actor and a man who goes to a masked ball; between the dramatic piece, which down to Terence's time had no masks, and the Atellan, which was essentially based on the character-mask, there subsisted an original distinction in no way to be effaced. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... mere professional man or merchant would have the heart to render his person thus conspicuous? And the hypothesis that might have disposed of him as a model was excluded by the freshness of his clothes. A poet, painter, sculptor, possibly an actor or musician—anyhow, something to which the generic name of artist, soiled with all ignoble use, could more or less flatteringly be applied—I made sure he was; an ornament of our own English-speaking race, moreover, proclaimed such by the light of intelligence that ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... run the gamut of the dramatic scale, we observe that as we descend from the higher forms, such as tragedy, psychological drama and "straight comedy," to the lower, such as musical comedy and burlesque, the license allowed playwright and actor increases so radically that we have a difference of kind rather than of degree. Certain conventions of course are common to all types. The "missing fourth side" of the room is a commonplace recognized by all. If we ourselves are never in the habit of communicating the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... asked for his song, and, as usual, demanding a theme, one of the guests, either facetiously or maliciously, called out, "Take Yates's big nose." (Yates, the actor, was one of the party.) To any one else such a subject would have been appalling: not so to Hook. He rose, glanced once or twice round the table, and chanted (so to speak) a series of verses perfect in rhythm and rhyme: the incapable theme being dealt with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... me of one in which I was an actor, and which was impressed upon my mind by a process which few boys are fond of, but which is very apt to make the impression durable. I fished for trout once without line or hook. I got a fine string of them, and myself into a pretty kettle of fish in the bargain. On my father's farm, as ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... sleep, and making me conscious that I must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my chief motives were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge against Parson Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father's tomb than seen me either a novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit upon a method of uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I had written romances instead of ...
— Passages From a Relinquised Work (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by Hannibal and accustomed to the soldiery might forward the attempt;" he communicated his design with Themistus, who had married the daughter of Gelon, and a few days afterwards incautiously disclosed it to a certain tragic actor, named Ariston, to whom he was in the habit of committing other secrets. He was a man of reputable birth and fortune, nor did his profession disgrace them, for among the Greeks no pursuit of that kind was considered dishonourable. He therefore discovered ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... addition, that the admirable manner of relating them and the wonderful variety of incidents with which they are beautified in the course of a private gentleman's story, add such delight in the reading, and give such a lustre, as well to the accounts themselves as to the person who was the actor, that no story, we believe, extant in the world ever came ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... a sailor in the United States navy, but having retired from the cruel sea, he became an actor in such plays as "Black-eyed Susan" in one of the variety theatres in Philadelphia. Mr. Charles D. Jones, of that city, who was connected with theatrical enterprises, and knew Mr. Cloud well, was one day surprised by the latter ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... energetic people retain their self-respect through shameful misconduct: they do not even lose the respect of others, because their talents benefit and interest everybody, whilst their vices affect only a few. An actor, a painter, a composer, an author, may be as selfish as he likes without reproach from the public if only his art is superb; and he cannot fulfil his condition without sufficient effort and sacrifice to make him feel noble and ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... cloud With whirlwind fraught, I drove impetuous on, Took fifty chariots, and at side of each Lay two slain warriors, with their teeth the soil Grinding, all vanquish'd by my single arm. 905 I had slain also the Molions, sons Of Actor, but the Sovereign of the deep Their own authentic Sire, in darkness dense Involving both, convey'd them safe away. Then Jove a victory of prime renown 910 Gave to the Pylians; for we chased and slew And gather'd ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... ended, t'other actor came, Whose prompt arrival much surprised the dame, For, as a husband, Clidamant had ne'er Such ardour shown, he seemed beyond his sphere. The lady to the girl imputed this, And thought, to hint it, ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... preserving republican liberty, must be gratified with the review of that arduous and doubtful struggle, which terminated in the triumph of human reason, and the establishment of that government. Even to him who was not an actor in the busy scene, who enjoys the fruits of the labour without participating in the toils or the fears of the patriots who have preceded him, the sentiments entertained by the most enlightened and virtuous of America at the eventful period between the restoration ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... should go just then: he had to appear on the boards that night. This was deemed to be a just impediment, and he was told to go next day. The next day was a "festa:" of course a sufficient reason for putting off everything. The day after, on presenting himself at the prison-door, the actor was told that the governor of the prison was out of Florence, and he must "call again" in a few days. When the governor returned, Stenterello was indisposed for a few days. When he got well the governor was indisposed, and when he got well there was another "festa;" and when at last ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... hilariously, upside down. One has the salutary amusement in reading him of visualizing the Universe in the posture of a Gargantuan baby, "prepared" for a sound smacking. Mr. Chesterton himself is the chief actor in this performance and wonderful pyrotechnic stars leap into ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... that Johnson said of an actor who played Sir Harry Wildair at Lichfield, "There is a courtly vivacity about the fellow;" when, in fact, according to Garrick's account, "he was the most vulgar ruffian that ever went upon boards."' Ante, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... of a mimic and an actor. During a political campaign, he took the platform against a certain Tom Corwin of Ohio, who was considered a great political orator. On one occasion Corwin was the first speaker, and to emphasize his speech, he danced about on the stage, gesticulated freely, and ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... many a fable about this grave, but if pressed will shake their heads sagely and refer you to "Master Trenoweth up yonder at Lantrig. Folks say she was a play-actor and he loved her. Anyway you may see him up in the churchyard most days, but dont'ee go nigh him then, unless you ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wholly on wires; laying their ears down, skimming away, pausing as though shot, and presto! full spread on the other tack. I observe in the official class mostly an insane jealousy of the smallest kind, as compared to which the artist's is of a grave, modest character - the actor's, even; a desire to extend his little authority, and to relish it like a glass of wine, that is IMPAYABLE. Sometimes, when I see one of these little kings strutting over one of his victories - wholly illegal, perhaps, and certain to be reversed to his shame if his superiors ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... book gets translated into English (I have been reading it in Henri Albert's French translation) it will assuredly be laughed at. I would hazard that it is the most conceited book ever written. Take our four leading actor-managers; extract from them all their conceit; multiply that conceit by the self-satisfaction of Mr. F.E. Smith, M.P., when he has made a joke; and raise the result to the Kaiser-power, and you will have something less than the cube-root of Nietzsche's conceit in this the last book ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... After the holidays he had always seen the last feats of Saltori, and heard the most recent strains of Tiralirini. He always went to a round of entertainments, and would make you laugh by the hour while he sang the songs or imitated the style of the last comic actor ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... private, and withdrawn from the knowledge of the many; where when this one point was agreed on, that the accused must be rescued whether by just or unjust means, every proposition that was most desperate was most approved; nor was an actor wanted for any deed however daring. Accordingly on the day of trial, when the people stood in the forum in anxious expectation, they at first began to feel surprised that the tribune did not come down; then when the delay was now becoming more suspicious, they considered that he ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... the harlequin, and drove the wind violently out of his puffed cheeks, so that they collapsed. By this he showed how his austerity loathed the clatter of the stage; for his ears were stopped with anger and open to no influence of delight. This reward, befitting an actor, punished an unseemly performance with a shameful wage. For Starkad excellently judged the man's deserts, and bestowed a shankbone for the piper to pipe on, requiting his soft service with a hard fee. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Heaven put it in her heart to do wrong, and she gave no thought to that sin, which has been the source of all our sorrows. Now, however, that you have convinced me by showing that you know all about our bed (which no human being has ever seen but you and I and a single maidservant, the daughter of Actor, who was given me by my father on my marriage, and who keeps the doors of our room) hard of belief though I have been ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... showed that the consequences would follow, whether he individually could foresee them or not. But, when words are used exactly, a deed is not done with intent to produce a consequence unless that consequence is the aim of the deed. It may be obvious, and obvious to the actor, that the consequence will follow, and he may be liable for it even if he regrets it, but he does not do the act with intent to produce it unless to aim to produce it is the proximate motive of the specific act, although there may be some ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... future, careless of the black and white stones; and even when you turn to the voluptuous beauty of the mouth, the impression remains so strong, that Russia's snows, and mountains of the slain, seem the tragedy that must naturally follow the appearance of such an actor. You turn from him, feeling that he is a product not of the day, but of the ages, and that the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... were axactly performed, by the influence of spirits of different spheres. Every actor in the great drama was influenced by spirits for whose inspiration he was best prepared. But all that took place under the vigilance of the highest order of spirits for the accomplishment of prophecies. In Revelation, xvii: 10 the seven ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... little do we know about anything!—a scene like that might impress itself somehow upon the hidden heart of nature. I do not pretend to know how, but the repetition had struck me at the time as, in its terrible strangeness and incomprehensibility, almost mechanical,—as if the unseen actor could not exceed or vary, but was bound to re-enact the whole. One thing that struck me, however, greatly, was the likeness between the old minister and my boy in the manner of regarding these strange phenomena. Dr. Moncrieff was not terrified, as ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... drinker, a deaf sexton, an invalid captain, and an old woman. What fun it was, to be sure, and how we roared over the performance! Here is the playbill which I held in my hand nineteen years ago, while the great writer was proving himself to be as pre-eminent an actor as he was an author. One can see by reading the bill that Dickens was manager of the company, and that it was under his direction that the plays were produced. Observe the clear evidence of his hand in the very ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... I guess! It's Peter K. Tracey; yes, the one that has his name on so many four-sheet posters. Noticed how he always has 'em read, ain't you? "Mr. Peter K. Tracey presents Booth Keene, the sterling young actor." Never forgets that "Mr."; but, say, I knew him when he signed it just "P. Tracey," and chewed his tongue some ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... the teachers turned their attention to her manners and "form," and here lay Adelle's worst mental torture. That young teacher, "Rosy" Stevens, who had fetched her from B——, had this task. "Rosy," who was only thirty, was supposed to be having "a desperate affair of the heart" with an actor, which she discussed with the older girls. She was the most popular chaperone in the school because she was "dead easy" and connived at much that might have resulted scandalously. "Rosy" shared the ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Johnson called him a mountebank. Robert Hall preached about the glories of heaven as no uninspired man ever preached about them, and it was said when he preached about heaven his face shone like an angel's, and yet good Christian John Foster writes of Robert Hall, saying: "Robert Hall is a mere actor, and when he talks about heaven the smile on his face is the reflection of his own vanity." John Wesley stirred all England with reform, and yet he was caricatured by all the small wits of his day. He was pictorialised, history says, on the board fences of ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... that, at the present time, after the lapse of a century, the same state of things practically obtain in the improved machines of to-day; Hargreaves' machine being represented by the system of intermittent spinning upon the improved self-actor mule, while Arkwright's water frame is represented by the system of continuous spinning upon the modern Ring Spinning frame. While weft yarn is now almost entirely produced on the mule, warp yarns are in many cases ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... busy spreading out his fishing-nets and lines. "It is my belief," he said, "that the pretty fellow yonder is some starveling play-actor without a brass farthing to ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... cuarenta calabazas....—Para ahorrarme de razones,[70-6] dire que, como el judio de Shakespeare, llego al mas sublime paroxismo tragico, repitiendo freneticamente aquellas terribles palabras 15 de Shylock, en que tan admirable dicen que estaba el actor Kemble:[70-7] ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... effecting a G. O. Smithian dribble, cannoned into him. To preserve his balance—this will probably seem a very thin line of defence, but 'I state but the facts'—he grabbed at the disciple of Smith amidst applause, and at that precise moment a new actor appeared on the scene—the Headmaster. Now, of all the things that lay in his province, the Headmaster most disliked to see a senior 'ragging' with a junior. He had a great idea of the dignity of the senior school, and did all that in him lay to see that ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... think I see him still. And indeed I had cause to remember the man for the sake of his communication. It was hard enough to make a theory fit the circumstances of the Flying Scud; but one in which the chief actor should stand the least excused, and might retain the esteem or at least the pity of a man like Dr. Urquart, failed me utterly. Here at least was the end of my discoveries; I learned no more, till I learned all; and my reader has the evidence complete. Is he more ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... their State in reverential terms. To hear Maud Younger—known everywhere as the "millionaire waitress" and the most devoted labor-fan in the country—pronounce the word California, should be a lesson to any actor in emotional sound values. The thing that struck me most on my first visit to California was that boosting instinct. In store windows everywhere, I saw signs begging the passer-by to root for this development project or ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... officer who had been in the same regiment. The latter was happy to meet his old messmate, but was ashamed to be seen with a player. He therefore hurried Bensley to an unfrequented coffee-house, where he asked him very seriously, "Hoo could ye disgrace the corps by turning a play-actor?" Mr. Bensley answered, that he by no means considered it in that light; on the contrary, that a respectable performer of good conduct was much esteemed, and kept the best company. "And what, man," said the other, "do ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... to fall in love with a little miss of sixteen. He taught her Latin and Greek—which was all very well—and married her, which was distinctly unwise. She had one son—my grandfather—and then ran away with an actor from London. After that she made a certain sensation on the stage, but I suspect she was clever enough to see that her real successes were personal ones; at all events, she made a good marriage as soon as ever she got the chance. The Hammerton ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... attended the Reformation at Montbeliard, where the indefatigable Farel was the chief actor. One of those highly dramatic incidents, in which the checkered life of this remarkable man abounds, is said to have preceded his withdrawal from the city. Happening, on St. Anthony's day, to meet, upon a bridge spanning a narrow ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Osiris, but of his son Horus; but as the death and resurrection of the god were celebrated in many cities of Egypt, it is also possible that in some places the part of the god come to life was played by a living actor instead of by an image. Another Christian writer describes how the Egyptians, with shorn heads, annually lamented over a buried idol of Osiris, smiting their breasts, slashing their shoulders, ripping ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... presence, and the most considerable people of the city would do the like. When all was ready for the ceremony, the corpse was put into a coffin, with all her jewels and magnificent apparel. The cavalcade began, and, as second actor in this doleful tragedy, I went next to the corpse, with my eyes full of tears, bewailing my deplorable fate. Before I came to the mountain, I addressed myself to the king, in the first place, and then to all those who were round me, and bowing ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... is the study of the products rather than of the processes of thought. But, at the same time, in studying the products we are studying the processes in the only way in which it is possible to do so. For the human mind cannot be both actor and spectator at once; we must wait until a thought is formed in our minds before we can examine it. Thought must be already dead in order to be dissected: there is no vivisection of consciousness. Thus we can never know more of the ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... outsiders—Jack and I—can. Naturally there would be heaps of heart interest, all over the place, wherever Patty was; and that would be all right if Larry weren't simply followed around by it too, the way actor-managers are by the spotlight. When we were doing our delicious motor run around Long Island, getting acquainted with the old whalers, and Indian chieftains, and golfers and millionairesses, it was sweet to see how Pat was unconsciously taming our Stormy Petrel to eat out of her hand. Even Jack saw ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... heard of an actor, who when playing the lovers' parts, only thought of one of the spectators; he played for her alone, and forgot all the rest of the house; the polytechnic candidate was my her, my only spectator, for whom I played. And when the ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... in the afternoon made merry at my expense for carrying the harp, by getting up a hiss for the former gentleman, who knew not one single word of his part, and by hitting the latter individual upon the nose with an apple, for which latter feat (as the actor was a great favorite,) I was hounded out of the theatre, and narrowly escaped being carried to the watch-house. I and my fair friend then took lodgings for the night ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... perhaps the least poetic of these dramatists, was Thomas Heywood, of whom little is known, except that he was one of the most prolific writers the world has ever seen. In 1598 he became an actor, or, as Henslowe, who employed him, phrases it, "came and hired himself to me as a covenanted servant for two years." The date of his first published drama is 1601; that of his last published work, a "General History of Women," is 1657. As ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... ago, Mr. Mathews took his leave in a characteristic speech, partly humorous and partly serious; but the enthusiastic audience laughed and cheered him all the way through; and it was rather comic to read the newspaper report of next morning, and to find that the actor's passages of the softest pathos had been ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... Looks in her face, until she take her up? Ev'n as that girl, Patroclus, such art thou, Shedding soft tears: hast thou some tidings brought Touching the gen'ral weal, or me alone? Or have some evil news from Phthia come, Known but to thee? Menoetius, Actor's son, Yet surely lives; and 'mid his Myrmidons Lives aged Peleus, son of AEacus: Their deaths indeed might well demand our tears: Or weep'st thou for the Greeks, who round their ships By death their ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... himself admirably, perhaps more correctly than he imagined. He was more calculated to advise and contest than to exercise power. He was rather a great spectator and critic than an eminent political actor. In the ordinary course of affairs he would have been too absolute, too haughty, and too slow. In a crisis, I question whether his mental reservations, his scruples of conscience, his horror of all public excitement, and his prevailing dread of responsibility, ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... action, he took a sword from a stand of weapons near him, drew it from its scabbard and kissing the hilt, held it out to De Launay who did the same—"That is understood! And for the rest, Roger my friend, take it all lightly and easily—as a farce!—as a bit of human comedy, with a great actor cast for the chief role. We are only supers, you and I, but we shall do well to stand near the wings in case ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... that had been erected against the coming of Bud Larkin and his animals, the cowmen and their punchers were making ready for their night's battle. The chief actor in these fevered preparations was Beef Bissell, whose hatred of Larkin was something to frighten babies with ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... Prince sung; there were my two nieces, and Lord Waldegrave, Lord Huntingdon, and Mr. Morrison the groom, and the evening was pleasant; but I had a much more agreeable supper last night at Mrs. Clive's, with Miss West, my niece Cholmondeley, and Murphy, the writing actor, who is very good company, and two or three more. Mrs. Cholmondeley is very lively; you know how entertaining the Clive is, and Miss West ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... talk much; indeed there was very little conversation. What there was Callan supplied. He—spoke—very—slowly—and—very —authoritatively, like a great actor whose aim is to hold the stage as long as possible. The raising of his heavy eyelids at the opening door conveyed the impression of a dark, mental weariness; and seemed somehow to give additional length to his white nose. His short, brown beard was getting very grey, ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... taken by boys. No women appeared on the stage until the reign of Charles II. The Play began with the Prologue, spoken by an actor dressed in a long black velvet coat bowing very humbly to the audience. After the Play was over the clowns began to tumble and to sing. In short, a farce succeeded a tragedy. The time of performance was one o'clock, and the ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... in a theatre the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... destined in the course of time to eclipse the fame won by his father, and to endear himself to the American people as a more finished, if less stormy, actor. This was EDWIN BOOTH. He was born on his father's farm near Baltimore, Maryland, In 1833, and after receiving a good common-school education, began his training for the stage. The elder Booth was quick to see that his boy ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... plead a case before my father," "Nor I before my son," said two distinguished lawyers. "If mamma is in the room, I shall never be able to get through my part," said a young amateur actor. ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the casual Jims and Bills were taken too suddenly to laugh, and the laugh having been lost, as Bland Holt, the Australian actor would put it in a professional sense, the audience had time to think, with the result that the joker swung his hand down through an ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... no book which can instruct one to read the human countenance correctly; and some special circumstance must have roused the suspicions of these four persons so much as to cause them to make these observations, and they were not as usual deceived by the humbug of this skilled actor, a past master in ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "dance" which I also saw, with the same bird as principal actor, seems to me another phase of the wooing, though I must say it resembled a war-dance as well; but love is so like war among the lower orders, even of men, that it is hard to distinguish between them. ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... Lyttelton, who, both as a Lady of the Bedchamber and Governess to the royal children, knew the Queen and Prince well—has recorded her impression of the chief actor in the scene. "The Queen's look and manner were very pleasing, her eyes much swollen with tears, but great happiness in her countenance, and her look of confidence and comfort at the Prince when they walked away as man and wife was very ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... scheme in mind I did not like, I used to encourage him to talk about it, knowing that he thus would be satisfied, without acting. He lives almost altogether in the head and in the imagination, and is really a teacher, in his own peculiar way, rather than an actor or practical man. That is why he takes offence at what seems to me such little things: they are not little to him, in his scheme of things, which is not the scheme of the world, and, alas! not even mine, I fear. He is so terribly ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... intellectual gains of former ages and other nations. Honour, too, to our King, and, that I may be just, to his illustrious wife; for wherever in the Grecian world a friend of the Muses appears, whether he is investigator, poet, architect, sculptor, artist, actor, or singer, he is drawn to Alexandria, and, that he may not be idle, work is provided. Palaces spring ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
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