"Lear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heroic type. Coriolanus—Caesar—Antony stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;—Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the work was originally produced it had illustrations to which ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... Quitman, commanding brigades in General Butler's division; Lieutenant-Colonels Garland and Wilson, commanding brigades in General Twiggs' division; Colonels Mitchell, Campbell, Davis, and Wood, commanding the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and 2d Texas regiments, respectively; and Majors Lear, Allen, and Abercrombie, commanding the 3d, 4th, and 1st regiments of infantry; all of whom served under my eye, and conducted their commands with coolness and gallantry against the enemy. Colonel Mitchell, Lieutenant-Colonel McClung, ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early 'dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See {tube}, {tty}; compare {dumb terminal}, {smart terminal}. See "{TV Typewriters}" (Appendix A) for an interesting true story about ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... find the fatality in "Hamlet," "King Lear," in "Macbeth"? Is its throne not erected in the very centre of the old king's madness, on the lowest degree of the young prince's imagination, at the very summit of the Thane's morbid cravings? Macbeth ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... in The Cenci is beautiful and conceivable and admirable: but unless we except her exquisite last words—and even they are more beautiful than inevitable—we shall hardly find what we find in "King Lear" and "The White Devil," "Othello" and "The Duchess of Malfy"—the tone of convincing reality; the note, as a critic of our own day might call it, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... mair - That some ane, ripin' after lear - Some auld professor or young heir, If still there's either - May find an' read me, an' be ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... believes—not by reason, but by faith. And he too repeats that Shakespeare was a great artist, and he buys the complete works of Shakespeare and puts them on his shelves, and he goes to see the marvellous stage-effects which accompany *King Lear* or *Hamlet*, and comes back religiously convinced that Shakespeare was a great artist. All because the passionate few could not keep their admiration of Shakespeare to themselves. This is not cynicism; but truth. And it is important that those who wish ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... he would exclaim, 'a very prepossessing old gentleman, Mr Richard—charming countenance sir—extremely calm—benevolence in every feature, sir. He quite realises my idea of King Lear, as he appeared when in possession of his kingdom, Mr Richard—the same good humour, the same white hair and partial baldness, the same liability to be imposed upon. Ah! A sweet subject for contemplation, sir, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... three flutes carry the burden of the accompaniment gracefully); a pleasant "Reverie" for string orchestra, harp, and organ; and two impromptus for string orchestra, a "Meditation" representing Cordelia brooding tenderly over the slumbering King Lear,—art ministering very tenderly to the mood,—and a cleverly ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... father haue foure sonnes, three faire and well formed both mynde and bodie, the fourth, // Deformed wretched, lame, and deformed, his choice shalbe, // creatures to put the worst to learning, as one good enoughe // commonlie to becum a scholer. I haue spent the most parte // set to lear- of my life in the Vniuersitie, and therfore I can // nyng. beare good witnes that many fathers commonlie do thus: wherof, I haue hard many wise, learned, and as good men as euer I knew, make great, and oft complainte: a ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... the Metaphor to the Simile is ascribed by Dr. Whately to the fact that "all men are more gratified at catching the resemblance for themselves, than in having it pointed out to them." But after what has been said, the great economy it achieves will seem the more probable cause. Lear's exclamation— ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... however, but answered, "That beats me, I own. Yet we shall drive, though it be upon two wheels an' behind a single horse. For Farmer Lear's driving into Tregarrick in an hour's time, an' ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... quite respectable, old-fogyfied times, remember amongst other amusements which we had as children the pictures at which we were permitted to look. There was Boydell's Shakspeare, black and ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling Fuselis! there were Lear, Oberon, Hamlet, with starting muscles, rolling eyeballs, and long pointing quivering fingers; there was little Prince Arthur (Northcote) crying, in white satin, and bidding good Hubert not put out his eyes; there was Hubert ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... complete numbers. I myself never missed; my companion, rarely. Others were sometimes absent, and sometimes came to time when they were in a very doubtful state, looking as if they were saying to themselves, with Lear,— ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Southern Germany, as if all trouble were over and all had been forgiven. We walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian England ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... has it in both its modern meanings, "vigorous," or "sensitive in nerves, and consequently weak, diseased." Hysteria is not in the Bible, and is found once in Shakespeare; as, "Hysterica passio, down," Lear ii. 4. It was common in Sydenham's day,—i.e., Charles II. and Cromwell's time,—but he classified under hysteria many disorders no longer ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... was most affected, and the backward-sloping tall letters with which I had aimed at giving it an air of distinction had already been compared by one of my teachers to Persian hieroglyphics. In this composition I had constructed a drama in which I had drawn largely upon Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and Goethe's Gotz van Berlichingen. The plot was really based on a modification of Hamlet, the difference consisting in the fact that my hero is so completely carried away by the appearance ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Lear once ruled in this land With princely power and peace; And had all things with heart's content, That might his joys increase. Amongst those things that nature gave, Three daughters fair had he, So princely seeming, beautiful, As ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... bitterness and disillusion. 'Julius Casar' presents the material failure of an unpractical idealist (Brutus); 'Hamlet' the struggle of a perplexed and divided soul; 'Othello' the ruin of a noble life by an evil one through the terrible power of jealousy; 'King Lear' unnatural ingratitude working its hateful will and yet thwarted at the end by its own excess and by faithful love; and 'Macbeth' the destruction of a large nature by material ambition. Without doubt this is the greatest continuous group of plays ever wrought out by ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of King Lear were a true one; and that a modern historian were giving the abstract of it in a school manual, purporting to contain all essential facts in British history valuable to British youth in competitive examination. The story would be ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... that can be imagined, too. Out of a billowy upheaval of vivid green foliage, a rifle-shot removed, rises the huge ruin of Heidelberg Castle, [2. See Appendix B] with empty window arches, ivy-mailed battlements, moldering towers—the Lear of inanimate nature—deserted, discrowned, beaten by the storms, but royal still, and beautiful. It is a fine sight to see the evening sunlight suddenly strike the leafy declivity at the Castle's base and dash up it and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the decision with acclamation, and the two elder ones vied with one another in attempts to set her mind at rest by undertaking everything, and promising for themselves and the children perfect regularity and harmony. Sophy, with a bluntness that King Lear would have highly disapproved, said, 'She was glad mamma was going, but she knew they should be all at sixes and sevens. She would do her best, and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Hamlet humbugging his enemies and their tool, Ophelia, with Hamlet opening his real mind to himself or his Horatio the very next moment; contrasted the real madness the author has portrayed in the plays of Hamlet and Lear by the side of these extravagant imitations, to save, if possible, even dunces, and dreamers, and criticasters from being taken in by the latter; and at their next seance pitched into the doctor's pet chimera, and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... my limbs shook like those of a palsied old man. I sank upon a stone to rest, to try and arrange my scattered ideas into some sort of connection and order. Mad! I clasped my aching head between my hands, and brooded on the fearful prospect looming before me, and in the words of poor King Lear, I prayed in ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... she talked freely enough now—of her school; of riding and motoring—she seemed to love going very fast; about Newmarket—which was 'perfect'; and theatres—plays of the type that Johnny Dromore might be expected to approve; these together with 'Hamlet' and 'King Lear' were all she had seen. Never was a girl so untouched by thought, or Art—yet not stupid, having, seemingly, a certain natural good taste; only, nothing, evidently, had come her way. How could it—'Johnny Dromore ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Andronicus. Romeo and Juliet. Timon of Athens. The Life and death of Julius Caesar. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Tragedy of Hamlet. King Lear. Othello, the Moore of Venice. Anthony and Cleopater. Cymbeline King ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... characterised? In a dramatic sense, are there not many Mr. Irvings? When a man can act "The Two Roses" and "The Dead Heart" with equal effect, when he can at will be as vulgar as Robert Macaire, or as dignified as Cardinal Wolsey; when he can be either as young as Hamlet or as old as Lear, the inquiry as to his plurality becomes natural and pertinent. For my part, I rank Mr. Irving the comedian above Mr. Irving the tragedian, just as I rank Nature above Art: each may be highest in its own way, yet the one may have a charm ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... of gracing Caesar's triumph, she snatches a dagger, exclaiming, "I will trust my resolution and my good hands." With the same swift instinct, Cassius trusts to his hands when he stabs Caesar: "Speak, hands, for me!" "Let me kiss your hand," says the blind Gloster to Lear. "Let me wipe it first," replies the broken old king; "it smells of mortality." How charged is this single touch with sad meaning! How it opens our eyes to the fearful purging Lear has undergone, to learn that royalty is no defence against ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... before I looked at one of the plays, beyond the names of them, which shows that Saintsbury was right, and I do care more for life than for poetry. No—I take it back. Do you know one of the tragedies—a Bible tragedy too—David—was written in his third period—much about the same time as Lear? The comedy, April Rain, is also a late work. Beckett is a fine ranting piece, like Richard II., but very fine for the stage. Irving is to play it this autumn when I'm in town; the part rather suits him—but who is to play Henry—a tremendous creation, sir. Betterton ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... charm, however; there is something picturesque in the big, comfortable shoulders of the Cote. That delicate critic M. Emile Montegut, in a charming record of travel through this region published some years ago, praises Shakespeare for having talked (in "Lear") of "waterish Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point. I stopped at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque, but I might almost have seen the little I discovered without stopping. It is a ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... White's, with felons, or a bore, Pay their last duty to the Court and come All fresh and fragrant, to the drawing-room; In hues as gay, and odours as divine, As the fair fields they sold to look so fine. "That's velvet for a king!" the flatterer swears 'Tis true, for ten days hence 'twill be King Lear's. Our Court may justly to our stage give rules, That helps it both to fools-coats and to fools. And why not players strut in courtiers' clothes? For these are actors too, as well as those: Wants reach all states; they beg but ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... fight, who had sought battle in their behalf and heaped them with favors. His eyes saw the depth of that resignation which gave to God the one jewel that would have atoned for the horrid sufferings of the past. If he were free! He thought of old Lear moaning over dead Cordelia. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... the virtue of Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of and isolation from mankind; in Hamlet even penetrating intellect proves helpless for want of the capacity of action; the poison of Iago taints the love of Desdemona and the grandeur of Othello; Lear's mighty passion battles helplessly against the wind and the rain; a woman's weakness of frame dashes the cup of her triumph from the hand of Lady Macbeth; lust and self-indulgence blast the heroism of Antony; pride ruins ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... actors having been always a heresy with him, and the deplorable length of dialogue to the small amount of action in their plays making them sadly tiresome. The first that he saw at the principal theatre was a version of Balzac's Pere Goriot. "The domestic Lear I thought at first was going to be very clever. But he was too pitiful—perhaps the Italian reality would be. He was immensely applauded, though." He afterwards saw a version of Dumas' preposterous play of Kean, in which most of the representatives of English actors wore red hats with steeple ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... her eyes cast down; flushed whenever she was addressed; stammered whenever she answered a question, and nearly died of heart failure when subjected to an examination of any sort. She delighted the committee when reading at sight from "King Lear," but somewhat discouraged them when she could not tell the capital of the United States. She admitted that her former teacher, Miss Dearborn, might have mentioned it, but if so she ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, and the antique Athenian stage poets are great. He would really not be great at all if it were not that he had religion enough to be aware that his religionless condition was one of despair. His towering King Lear would be only a melodrama were it not for its express admission that if there is nothing more to be said of the universe than Hamlet has to say, then 'as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... no in titles nor in rank: It's no in wealth like Lon'on Bank, To purchase peace and rest. It's no in makin muckle, mair, [much, more] It's no in books, it's no in lear, [learning] To make us truly blest: If happiness hae not her seat An' centre in the breast, We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest! Nae treasures nor pleasures Could make us happy lang; The heart aye's the part aye That makes us right ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... titles nor in rank; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest. It's no in makin' muckle mair; It's no in books; it's no in lear; To ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... home, if it were not for Booth's playing. A farce or a comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home." He was much pleased one night with Mr. McCullough's delineation of the character of "Edgar," which the actor played in support of Edwin Forrest's "Lear." He wished to convey his approval to the young actor, and asked Mr. Brooks, his companion at the moment, with characteristic simplicity, "Do you suppose he would come to the box if we sent word?" Mr. McCullough was summoned, and, standing at the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... proclaimed. "No, I beg your pardon!" she hastily corrected herself, "King Lear! I hadn't noticed the crown." (Bruno had very cleverly provided one, which fitted him exactly, by cutting out the centre of a dandelion to make ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... After tea I read Daru, and copied fair a speech I had been writing for an imaginary member of the House of Peers, on the Reform Bill. John Mason called, and they sat down to a rubber, and I came to my own room and read "King Lear." ... ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a gun or a fishing-rod. Forbye, I would rather walk ae mile on the hill wi' ye than twae, for ye gang up a brae-face like a mawkin! God! There's no a single man's trade that ye're no brawly fitted for. And then ye've a heap o' book-lear that folk learned ye away about England, though I cannot speak muckle on that, no being ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... thousands, and then, when they thought they were going to make millions, letting it down and scooping them. My habit of listening intently to Uncle Nate's telegrammatic style of talk caused him to like me. I resembled King Lear: I talked with those who were wise, and said little, and Nathan's aphorisms about trade and politics made good paragraphs when boiled down ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... fancy realiz'd, the bard shall see, And his best commentator breathe in thee. She spoke: her magic powers the actor tried; Then Hamlet moraliz'd and Richard died; The dagger gleam'd before the murderer's eye, And for old Lear each bosom heav'd sigh; Then Romeo drew the sympathetic tear, With him and Cibber Love lay bleeding here. Enchanting Cibber! from that warbling throat No more pale Sorrow pours the liquid note. Her voice suppress'd, and Garrick's genius fled, Melpomene ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... frankly enough to David. At such times his language took an exasperating Shakespearean turn. He was abominably fond of posing as Lear or Jaques—as a man much buffeted, and acquainted with all the ugly secrets of life. Purcell stood generally for 'the enemy;' and to Purcell his half-mad fancy attributed most of his misfortunes. It was Purcell who had undermined his business, taken away ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her hand, And prattles to the night. Anon, a reverend form With tattered robe and forehead bare, That challenge all the torments of the air, Goes by! And the pent feelings choke in one long sigh, While, as the mimic thunder rolls, you hear The noble wreck of Lear Reproach like things of life the ancient skies, And commune with the storm! Lo! next a dim and silent chamber, where Wrapt in glad dreams, in which, perchance, the Moor Tells his strange story o'er, The gentle Desdemona chastely lies, Unconscious of the loving murderer ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... styles—the first containing such lighter, friendlier work, as "Life's Little Ironies," "Under a Greenwood Tree," and "The Trumpet Major"—the second being the period of the great tragedies which assume the place, in his work, of "Hamlet," "Lear," "Macbeth" and "Othello," in the work of Shakespeare—the third, of curious and imaginative interest, expresses in quite a particular way, Mr. Hardy's own peculiar point of view. The Well-Beloved, Jude the Obscure, and the later poems would belong ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... immediately sympathize with them. We need no numerous notes, no antiquarian dissertations, to enable the most ignorant to recognize the sentiments and diction of the characters of Homer; we have but, as Lear says, to strip off our lendings—to set aside the factitious principles and adornments which we have received from our comparatively artificial system of society, and our natural feelings are in unison with those of the bard of Chios and the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... picture not long since, in Edinburgh, copied from an engraving in Boydell's Shakspeare; subject,—"Lear (and suite) in the storm," but coloured according to the imagination and taste of the artist; its name ought assuredly to have been Redcap and the blue-devils, for the venerable and lamented monarch had fine streaming locks of the real carrot hue, whilst his very hideous companions showed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... other countries, or dwindle in numbers, or both. Dynasties and aristocracies which have disregarded the laws of nature have decreased in numbers and degenerated in stature; 'mariages de convenance' leave their enfeebling stamp on the offspring of them (King Lear). The marriage of near relations, or the marrying in and in of the same family tends constantly to weakness or idiocy in the children, sometimes assuming the form as they grow older of passionate licentiousness. The common prostitute rarely ...
— The Republic • Plato
... because he starts from within. He reaches, as it were, the central fire, in the heat of which every separate faculty, every animal want, every fortuitous incident is melted down and lost. We never could observe in actual experience passion such as Lear's, or meditation such as Hamlet's, fusing everything else into itself. Facts at every step would interfere to prevent such a possibility. But let us place ourselves, by the poet's help, within the soul of Lear or Hamlet, and we shall be ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... of Junction City, Kansas, has written a series of short stories on the property rights of women in Kansas, a subject that was and is, still, of vital importance to the women of the state. "The Legal Status of Mrs. O'Rourke" and "King Lear in Kansas" are two ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... these in date of composition, and in popular estimation at least among English readers, comes, 'Le Pere Goriot.' It is certainly trite to call the book a French "Lear," but the expression emphasizes the supreme artistic power that could treat the motif of one of Shakespeare's plays in a manner that never forces a disadvantageous comparison with the great tragedy. The retired vermicelli-maker is not as grand a figure as the doting King of Britain, but he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... will see what they have really lost in Lord Byron. To commence with the great Shakspeare himself, to whom universal admiration continues to be paid. Had Shakspeare been cut off at the same early period as Byron, The Tempest, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and several others of an equal character, would never have been written. The high reputation of Dryden would also have been limited—his fame, perhaps, unknown. The Absalom and Achitophel is the earliest of his best productions, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... an open slight, attended with displeasure at the same, the slight being put upon self, or upon some dear one, unbefittingly. The vengeance that the angry man craves is a vengeance that all shall see. "No, ye unnatural hags," cries Lear in his fury, "I will do such things,—what they shall be yet I know not, but they shall be the terror of the earth." When we are angry, we talk of "making an example" of the offender. The idea is that, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... the King, is, like Agamemnon, a warrior-king. But, unlike Agamemnon, he is blameless with regard to Gertrude. Yet Gertrude, like Clytemnestra, is the potential murderer of her husband, as Lady Macbeth is murderess, as the daughters of Lear. The women murder the supreme male, the ideal ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... only one is laid in England; and that one, "The Merry Wives of Windsor"—the only one not written chiefly or largely in verse—is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies (except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, "Lear" and "Macbeth," stand on British ground. Is "Hamlet" on that score less English than "Lear," or "Othello" than "Macbeth"? Does Italy count Juliet ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... functions throughout Flanders, Douay, and Tournay, the most thriving and populous portions of the Netherlands, with a swiftness, precision, and even with a jocularity which hardly seemed human. There was a kind of grim humor about the man. The woman who, according to Lear's fool, was wont to thrust her live eels into the hot paste, "rapping them o' the coxcombs with a stick and crying reproachfully, Wantons, lie down!" had the spirit of a true inquisitor. Even so dealt Titelmann with his heretics writhing on the rack or in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... innocence and sunlight shadowed by black robes of Dis. Upon the coward who feared all but the darkest and most devious passages of crime shone high, clear brows of Caesar and Aurelius. Gray folios of Shakespeare held up to the ambitious ingrate the warning titles of "Lear" and "Hamlet" and "Macbeth." And by his side brooded ever that mystic relic of the farther past—the Mummy, from whose case had stepped a daughter of the Pharaohs in ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... about dramatists; you have read Shakespeare?" "Yes, every play again and again." "Which do you like best?" "I like them all, the historical and the imaginative; I have never seen one acted, but to me King Lear is his masterpiece." ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... all corresponded with this, and as she had no love of language she had long ceased to attend to such remarks, although she followed them with the same kind of mechanical respect with which she heard many of Lear's speeches read aloud. Her mind was still serene and really occupied with praise of her own nature and praise of God, that is of the solemn and satisfactory order ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... whither he was brought by Thetis, whose mother's prayer had moved the Heart of Zeus, to dwell with Cadmus and Peleus, is Achilles' true home; or the isle of the heroes of all time, described by Carducci, where King Lear sits telling OEdipus of his sufferings, and Cordelia calls to Antigone, "Come, my Greek sister! We will sing of peace to our fathers." Helen and Iseult, silent and thoughtful, roam under the shade of the myrtles, while the setting sun kisses their golden ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... perhaps there is something in the Shakespearian width of sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Lucrece, with only the intellectual material of a rakish Stratford lad's schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years' association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so easily into the actor-manager ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... had plainly intimated that, like King Lear, she had lost her woman's kingdom—her heart—and so was not able to reward such suit and service, how came it she kept poor Stanton at a distance, but welcomed the society of Van Berg? Possibly her ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... himself a mischief, and keeps a lear eye still, for fear it should escape him. A man that sees a great deal more in every thing than is to be seen, and yet he thinks he sees nothing: his own eye stands in his light. He is a fellow commonly guilty of some weaknesses, which he might conceal if he were careless:—now ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... Wait, now, here's something from King Lear. The sky is black, see? Rain is pouring down, thunder roars, lightning—zzz zzz zzz—splits the whole sky, ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... Lear's—for he had felt the sting Of all too greatly giving The kingdom of his mind to those Who for it deemed him mad. [Footnote: Cale Young ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... so often shows a tendency to eccentric and abnormal conduct. The fault is with society, which feels instinctively that those who rise too high in excellence must be crushed. And this is the theme of every real tragedy. Othello, Lear, Njal, Grettir, Clarissa Harlowe, the Maid of Orleans, Antigone, Prometheus, and, as I hope to show, Tristan and Isolde, these are but a few among those who must perish from no fault in themselves, but because they are too ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... persuasion, to join the rest of the party at dinner. In the evening, all (Fairthorn excepted) draw round the fire. Waife is entreated by George to read a scene or two out of Shakespeare. He selects the latter portion of "King Lear." Darrell, who never was a playgoer, and who, to his shame be it said, had looked very little into Shakespeare since he left college, was wonderstruck. He himself read beautifully—all great orators, I suppose, do; but his talent was not ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... until he was able to settle down comfortably in lodgings, in Dove Court, Mansion House. He was soon hard at work upon 'The Death of Rizzio,' adorning his walls with pictures he had brought with him or sent for afterwards from Kendal, such as 'King Lear,' 'Elfrida,' 'The Death of Lefevre,' and a few portraits of friends. The Rizzio picture has been represented as 'a work of extraordinary merit, combining energetic action with strong expression.' Its fate was sad enough; attracting no notice, producing no profit, and at length ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... they do not fulfill the requirements of our modern short-story for the reason that they are not constructed for one single impression, but are in reality parts of possible longer stories. They are, as it were, parts of stories not unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and A Lear of the Steppes, and lack those complete and concise artistic effects found in the short-stories, Markheim and Mumu, by the same authors. Both Ruth and the Prodigal Son are exceptionally well told, possess a splendid moral tone, and are excellent prophecies of what the nineteenth century ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Virgil. Lamb got exceedingly merry and exquisitely witty; and his fun in the midst of Wordsworth's solemn intonations of oratory was like the sarcasm and wit of the fool in the intervals of Lear's passion. He made a speech and voted me absent, and made them drink my health. "Now," said Lamb, "you old lake poet, you rascally poet, why do you call Voltaire dull?" We all defended Wordsworth, and ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... injustice of their fate, and seeing their own offspring brought up in evidence against them, through the most detestable acts, and by the basest subornation, would naturally extort from minds even of iron mould. If ever Lear's or Timon's power of malediction could be justifiably called into exercise, it would be against such a tribunal and such witnesses as they had generally ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... popular applause. The Editor of the Reliques had indirectly preferred a claim to the praise of invention, by not concealing that his supplementary labours were considerable! how selfish his conduct, contrasted with that of the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance!—Open this far-famed Book!—I have done so at random, and the beginning of the Epic Poem Temora, in eight Books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light. The green ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the gear Is gone where glint the pawky een. And aye the stound is birkin lear Where sconnered yowies wheepen yestreen. The creeshie rax wi' skelpin' kaes Nae mair the howdie bicker whangs, Nor weanies in their wee bit claes Glour light as ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... in "King Lear." Avarice closes the palace doors against the white-haired King. Greed pushes him into the night to wander o'er the wasted moor, an exiled king, uncrowned and uncared for. In such hours garden becomes desert. This is the drama of man's life. The soul thirsts for ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... scholars, but the general reader is perhaps unfamiliar how Shakespeare was perverted. From this material I thought that I might lay out an instructive paper; how, for example, the whirling passion of Lear was once wrought to soft and pleasant uses for a holiday. Cordelia is rescued from the villains by the hero Kent, who cries out in a transport, "Come to my arms, thou loveliest, best of women!" The scene is laid in the woods, but as night comes on, Cordelia's old nurse appears. A scandal is ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... Musick, for the Benefit of Mr. Edward Keen, the Father of twenty Children; and that this Day the haughty George Powell hopes all the good-natur'd part of the Town will favour him, whom they Applauded in Alexander, Timon, Lear, and Orestes, with their Company this Night, when he hazards all his heroick Glory for their Approbation in the humbler ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... conception Schiller took counsel freely of Shakspere, whose name had now become for young Germany the symbol of all things great in dramatic writing. The first soliloquy of Franz Moor reminds one at once of Edmund in 'Lear', though there is none of the kind of borrowing which makes easy prey for the philologist. Both villains covet the wealth and station of a preferred brother; both make use of a specious obstetrical argument and both operate with forged letters. In general, however, the portrait ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... simular man of virtue, Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. — Lear. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... artist to fill himself to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out. I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an excellent thing to take all the trouble, if you throw ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and "Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in "Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia. Berlioz en revanche was ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... excite his leonine wrath and sense of intolerable wrong. Three times he had quitted his villa, with vows never to return to it, and three times he had been led back. When for a fourth time—like a feeble yet majestic Lear—one hot summer day, toward noon, he flung himself, or was flung, out of doors with only a few pauls in his pocket, it was to Casa Guidi that he made his way broken-hearted, yet breathing forth wrath.[73] Browning had often ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Gregorian chant or the sequences of Notker of Tubilo), the other voices would sing songs in the vernacular, and, strangest of all, one voice would repeat some Latin word, or even a "nonsense word" (to use Edward Lear's term) but much more slowly than the other voices. Thus the needs of the Mystery were as well met by incipient counterpoint on the one hand, as, on the other, the secular song-play engendered the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... luvit ilk ither weel, 'Twas then we twa did part; Sweet time—sad time! twa bairns at schule, Twa bairns, and but ae heart! 'Twas then we sat on ae laigh bink, To leir ilk ither lear; And tones, and looks, and smiles were ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of those obsolete elderly persons who quote Shakespeare. "Ah, well," he said, "your mother is like Kent in King Lear—she's too old to learn. Is she as fond as ever of lace? and as keen as ever after a bargain?" He handed a card out of the carriage window. "I have just seen an old patient of mine," he resumed, "in whom I feel a friendly interest. She is retiring from business by my advice; ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... with one who is perpetually tempting me to laugh at him, pray, dearest Darsie, let not thy ardour for adventure carry thee into more such scrapes as that of the Solway Sands. The rest of the story is a mere imagination; but that stormy evening might have proved, as the clown says to Lear, 'a naughty night to ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak a life-long abhorrence upon the poor, blameless man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an explosion of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to me in the Athenaeum Exhibition. Would fire ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... reading, the other sleeping, while the hours of the warm summer afternoon slipped away, ripples on the ocean of the lovely, changeless eternity, the consciousness of God. For a time the watching sister was absorbed in King Lear; then she fell to wondering whether Cordelia was not unkindly stiff toward her old father, but perceived at length that, with such sisters listening, she could not have spoken otherwise. Then she wondered whether there could be women so bad as Goneril and Regan, concluding that Shakspere ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... life; she cared little what happened to her. And it is just such moods that transform and elevate what otherwise would be absurd to the nobly serious; that changes the impossible into the possible; just as an exalted mood or mind is, or was, the primary difference between Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Lear, and any of the forgotten Bowery melodramas ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... success was tremendous—then came the sad ending. McCullough had always been supremely great in characters requiring the delineation of madness—Virginius, King Lear, Othello. Whether this had anything to do with the final tragedy cannot be said, but in 1884, while playing at Chicago, he broke down in the midst of a performance, and had to be led from the stage. His mind ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, by the inherent fault of stage representation, sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly! How can the profound sorrows of Hamlet be depicted by a gesticulating actor? So, to see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm in which he goes out is not more inadequate to represent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... call the most universal genius that ever existed. He has a truly wonderful variety. It is almost impossible to pronounce in which he has done best, his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Othello. He is equally excellent in his comic vein as his tragic. Falstaff is in his degree to the full as admirable and astonishing, as what he achieved that is noblest under the auspices of the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... disgusting wound. A few days later he became more enthusiastic, and wrote: "You will be very proud of 'Le Pere Goriot.' My friends insist that nothing is comparable to it, and that it is above all my other compositions."[*] Certainly the vivid portrait of old Goriot, that ignoble King Lear, who in his extraordinary passion of paternal love rouses our sympathy, in spite of his many absurdities and shortcomings, is a striking instance of Balzac's power in the creation ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the orderly-room 'bout eleven, and you can fill up the chit and I'll fire it in for you. It's only a matter of form. It goes through to Colonel Lear at La ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... is as correct and elegant after our canon of to-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel as if I did; what is ill done I reck not of. Shakspeare's passages of passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... cadaverous:"—Milton's two elder daughters are said to have robbed him of his books, besides cheating and plaguing him in the economy of his house, etc., etc. His feelings on such an outrage, both as a parent and a scholar, must have been singularly painful. Hayley compares him to Lear. See part third, Life of Milton, by W. Hayley (or Hailey, as spelt ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... are passages in King Lear which are enough to make us wish we had never been born. They are almost an impeachment of the Ruler of the Universe, and yet—there is Cordelia. Whence did she come? She is as much His handiwork as Regan, and in all our conclusions about Him we ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... significance, in which every thought is generated by the idea of the screen. As long as the photoplays are fed by the literature of the stage, the new art can never come to its own and can never reach its real goal. It is surely no fault of Shakespeare that Hamlet and King Lear are very poor photoplays. If ever a Shakespeare arises for the screen, his work would be equally unsatisfactory if it were dragged to the stage. Peer Gynt is no longer Ibsen's if the ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... him what a world are dead Which he reviv'd—to be revived so No more. Young Hamlet, old Hieronimo, Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside That lived in him ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... with entire sincerity,—I said,—always feels himself in danger of two things, namely,—an affectation of bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and actual rudeness. What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt to run to mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... life would cease to continue so if these were forgotten. The old proverb does not tell you to forget that you may forgive, but to forgive that you may forget. It is forgiveness of wrong, for forgetfulness of the evil that was in it; such as poor old Lear begged ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Or as Lear I pour'd for the deep imprecation, By my daughters of kingdom and reason depriv'd: Till fir'd by loud plaudits, and self adulation, I consider'd myself as a ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... personification. Thus at one time*1* he likens men to clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the browsing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads; while at another he addresses an old red hill of Georgia as "Thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer."*2* Like other Southern poets,*3* Lanier sometimes fails to check his imagination, and in consequence leaves his readers "bramble-tangled in a brilliant maze," as in his description ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... very hoarse. During the night he felt ill and awoke his wife. As soon as it was daylight, Mrs. Washington sent a messenger posthaste for Dr. Craik. Before he arrived, Washington insisted upon being bled, and his secretary, Tobias Lear, sent across the river to Port Tobacco for Dr. Gustavus Brown. When Dr. Craik arrived he was alarmed at the condition of his friend, bled him twice, and asked to have Dr. Dick called for consultation. The three doctors battled with their primitive ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... opposite pages of one of his folio letter-books, now in the Library of Congress. These copies are respectively in the handwriting of WASHINGTON's private secretaries, viz:—Major William Jackson: Tobias Lear: Bartholomew Dandridge and ...
— Washington's Masonic Correspondence - As Found among the Washington Papers in the Library of Congress • Julius F. Sachse
... own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form. Nor would the form itself have been attainable ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... King Lear, who in ancient times reigned in Britain, having in his old age turned over all his possessions to his two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, who professed to love him more than did their younger sister Cordelia, was by them cruelly deprived of his crown and turned out of his palace. None ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... marjoram, savory, parsley, bruised with the back of a ladle, and give them two or three walms on the fire in the broth; then dish the chines in thin slices of fine French bread, broth them, and lay on them some boiled beef-marrow, boil'd in strong broth, some slic't lemon, and run all over with a lear made of beaten butter, the yolk of an egg or two, the juyce of two or three oranges, and some ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... the girl said, "without you cutting up crazy and making folks talk. If you want to dance, for goodness' sake hire somebody to lear—to teach you, same as ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings will never mark it. Think'st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling the hour in Caesar's Rome, buried that Roman 'stead o' burning him and gave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. Go ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... murder and massacre; with all its foolish and cruel fables; with all its infamous doctrines; with its spirit of caste; with its spirit of hatred, and tell me whether it was written by a good God. Why, if you will read the maledictions and curses of that book, you would think that God, like Lear, had divided heaven among his daughters, and then, in the insanity of despair, had launched his curses ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... period of great poets may rest assured that he is a critic born—may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined the author of ‘The Returne from Parnassus’ in despising the unacademic author of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’ Among this band of great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the epic, has now, by way of recreation, or ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... gaun, ye broken men?" Quo fause Sakelde; "come tell to me?" Now Dickie of Dryhope led that band, And the nevir a word o lear ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... tawse of old Bleach-the-boys. But if the business went on at this rate there would be little in it for the boy. Gourlay was not without a thought of his son's welfare when he packed him off to Skeighan. He would give him some book-lear, he said; let him make a kirk or a ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... myself, you see! Well,—there's your property. And with what your Mother left you will buy books and writing paper! As for my property—that's going to Jack. I've got the papers for that too. Not being an idiot I've saved out enough for myself—no Lear business for mine! Well, boy—I'm sorry you're a fool. But you've got what you ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... shows that Saintsbury was right, and I do care more for life than for poetry. No - I take it back. Do you know one of the tragedies - a Bible tragedy too - DAVID - was written in his third period - much about the same time as Lear? The comedy, APRIL RAIN, is also a late work. BECKETT is a fine ranting piece, like RICHARD II., but very fine for the stage. Irving is to play it this autumn when I'm in town; the part rather suits him - but who is to play Henry ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... set-to-on Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Virgil. Lamb got exceedingly merry, and exquisitely witty, and his fun, in the midst of Wordsworth's solemn intonations of oratory, was like the sarcasm and wit of the fool in the intervals of Lear's passion.' Although the specimens of wit recorded no longer seem inspired, we can well believe Haydon's statement that it was an immortal evening, and that in all his life he never passed a more delightful time. We have abundant testimony to the fact that the artist-host was himself an exceptionally ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the beauties of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Edmund Spenser's immortal Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare's tender women, the Juliet we love, the Rosalind who is ever in our hearts, the Beatrice, the Imogen, gentle Ophelia, or kindly but ill-starred Desdemona, or the great heroes of tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello, or I might ask you to hear a word about Ben Jonson, "rare Ben," or poor Philip Massinger who died a stranger, of the Puritan Milton, the great Catholic Dryden, or Swift, or ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... with propriety, however well delivered. Shakspeare is not more admired for writing his plays, than Garrick for acting them. I think him a very good and very various player—but several have pleased me more, though I allow not in so many parts. Quin in Falstaff, was as excellent as Garrick in Lear. Old Johnson far more natural in every thing he attempted. Mrs. Porter and your Dumesnil surpassed him in passionate tragedy; Cibber and O'Brien were what Garrick could never reach, coxcombs, and men of fashion.(778) Mrs. Clive is at least as perfect in low comedy—and Yet to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Dick Devereux's benefit is actually fixed for the Christmas holidays, when his cousin undertakes to die for positively the last time, and his uncle will play in the most natural manner conceivable, the last act of "King Lear."' In fact, this family calamity was rather a cheerful subject among Devereux's friends; and certainly Devereux had no reason to love that vicious, selfish old lunatic, Lord Athenry, who in his prodigal and heartless reign, before straw and darkness swallowed ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... at Glasgow University. There was in Mr Lushington's personal aspect, and noble simplicity of manner and character, something that strongly resembled Tennyson himself. Among their common friends were Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the Book of Nonsense ("with such a pencil, such a pen"), Mr Venables (who at school modified the profile of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Tennyson met his friends at The Cock, which he rendered classic; among them were Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and Dickens. The ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... expense of his program. Are the somewhat picturesque episodes of "Harold in Italy," whatever their virtues, and they are many, more than vaguely related to the Byronism that ostensibly elemented them? The surprisingly conventional overture to "King Lear" makes one feel as though Berlioz had sat through a performance of one of Shakespeare's comedies under the impression that he was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its subject is the music. And where, on the other hand, Berlioz ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Nov. 21. Berlioz's overture to "King Lear" given by the Philharmonic Society of New York City. ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... been urging Tobias Lear, Washington's secretary, to get out of Washington's papers remarks injurious to himself, was greatly exercised at the publication of Marshall's book about as much as the better element ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... worked upon, and I promised to use my influence to procure for him a pardon. I went to Mr Farmer, but all my efforts were unavailing. The culprit passed a sleepless night in the intolerable agony of lear. Before he was brought up to be flogged, Mr Pigtop had ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... will, I think, be doubted by no reader who has reached the second reading of this play by the way which I have pointed out to him. And why, indeed, should Ulysses not speak for Shakespeare, or how could it be other than that he should? The man who had written "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," and "Macbeth," if he wished to find Ulysses, had only to turn his mind's eye inward; and thus we have in this drama Shakespeare's only ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... again? Last night I had been in a sad quandary of spirits, in what they call the evening; but a pipe and some generous Port, and King Lear (being alone), had its effects as a remonstrance. I went to bed pot-valiant. By the way, may not the Ogles of Somersetshire be ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Regius is an imperfect monument of a time of poetical energy in which old forms were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... away from the subscriber, on Sunday night, 27th inst., my NEGRO GIRL, Lear Green, about 18 years of age, black complexion, round-featured, good-looking and ordinary size; she had on and with her when she left, a tan-colored silk bonnet, a dark plaid silk dress, a light mouslin delaine, also one watered silk cape and one tan colored cape. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... were the wisest and kindliest men at court. When the master decked a character in cap and bells, it was as though he had given bonds for the man's humanity. Touchstone followed his master into exile; and when all seemed to have forsaken King Lear the fool bared himself to the storm and covered the shaking old man with his own cloak. And if Costard, Trinculo, Touchstone, Jaques and Mercutio had lived in Salem in Sixteen Hundred Ninety-two, there would have been not only a flashing of merry jests, but a flashing of rapiers as well, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... martial deeds of British kings, of whose existence there is no previous record, their victories over giants and dragons, and the various supernatural influences to which they were subject. Hence comes the story of King Lear and of Jack the Giant-Killer, and here are first met the characters of King Arthur and the enchanter Merlin. This book having been translated into Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, at once attained a great popularity ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman |
