"Lear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impressions her husband stood out definitely, a dominant influence. She seemed to be only now beginning to feel his dominance. Yet all the time, she could not get away from the sense of living in some fantastic dream—an Edward Lear nonsense dream. The sight of the kangaroos in the Bush brought a particular rhyme of her childhood to her mind. She half said, half sang ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... poignant kind. Browning told us that he did not know Landor very well, but that he saw him in the last years of his life under circumstances of a terribly pathetic kind. Landor played almost exactly the part of King Lear—though from a different reason—and got almost exactly King Lear's reward. Landor, it will be remembered, was originally a rich man. It will also be remembered that he was possessed of a very arbitrary and turbulent nature and quarrelled with many members ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... old hill! thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer — King, that no subject man nor beast may own, Discrowned, undaughtered and alone — Yet shall the great God ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... troublesome, Lear to whose limber tongue there was constantly leaping words unprintable and names of tar, deserves no soft pity at our hands. All his life he had been training his three daughters for exactly the treatment he was to receive. All his life Lear had been lubricating the chute that was to give ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... 31st, I took Louisa, at half-past seven, to the house of Mr. Hawes, an under Secretary of State, to see a beautiful children's masque. It was an impersonation of the "Old Year" dressed a little like LEAR with snowy hair and draperies. OLD YEAR played his part inimitably, at times with great pathos, and then introducing witty hits at all the doings of his reign, such as exploding cotton, the new planet, a subject ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... opportunity of seeing a little of his thought, running as an undercurrent to his nature. Clara had been singing with such sweetness of expression and pathetic emphasis, that my eyes were filled with tears of emotion. Miss Lear, a young lady friend, followed her, and sang with such a shrill voice, such unprecedented flying about among the octaves, that it shocked me through every nerve, and I trembled visibly and uttered an involuntary exclamation ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... to call the most universal genius that ever existed. He has a truly wonderful variety. It is almost impossible to pronounce in which he has done best, his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Othello. He is equally excellent in his comic vein as his tragic. Falstaff is in his degree to the full as admirable and astonishing, as what he achieved that is noblest under the auspices of the graver muse. His poetry and the fruits of his imagination are ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... was Greek to Kim). French, too was vital, and the best was to be picked up in Chandernagore a few miles from Calcutta. Also a man might go far, as he himself had done, by strict attention to plays called Lear and Julius Caesar, both much in demand by examiners. Lear was not so full of historical allusions as Julius Caesar; the book cost four annas, but could be bought second-hand in Bow Bazar for two. Still more important than Wordsworth, or the eminent authors, Burke and Hare, was the art and ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... the fatality in "Hamlet," "King Lear," in "Macbeth"? Is its throne not erected in the very centre of the old king's madness, on the lowest degree of the young prince's imagination, at the very summit of the Thane's morbid cravings? Macbeth we may well pass by; not need we linger over Cordelia's father, for his absence of consciousness ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... one given stone in the flagging does man after man cross yonder street? What plebeian Lear or Oedipus, what Israel Potter, cowers there by the corner they shun? From this turning point, then, we too cross over and skim events to the end; omitting the particulars of the starveling's wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers; or his ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... 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 of ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... and I daresay set many a female heart a palpitating. When he made his first appearance, there was just such a humming and clapping of hands as you may have heard when the celebrated Garrick comes upon the stage in King Lear, or King Richard, or any other top character. But how agreeably were we disappointed, when our young gentleman made such an oration as would not have disgraced a Pitt, an Egmont, or a Murray! while he spoke, all was hushed in admiration and attention; you could have almost heard ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... fiddles. There appear to be two legitimate modes of interweaving tragedy with something like comedy. The first and most easy, which has often been resorted to, is to make the lower or less marked characters of the drama, like the porter in "Macbeth," or the fool in "King Lear," speak the language appropriated to their station, even in the midst of the distresses of the piece; nay, they may be permitted to have some slight under-intrigue of their own. This, however, requires the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... something in the Shakespearian width of sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate Iago and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... white fingers on thy shoulders laid, And then the lonely duel in the glade, The broken swords, the stifled scream, the gore, Thy grand revengeful eyes when all is o'er,— These things are well enough,—but thou wert made For more august creation! frenzied Lear Should at thy bidding wander on the heath With the shrill fool to mock him, Romeo For thee should lure his love, and desperate fear Pluck Richard's recreant dagger from its sheath— Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... Hengist and Horsa, stallion and mare, as nicknames assumed by Jutish braves on the war-path. Sumpter, Old Fr. sommetier, from Somme, burden, was used both of a packhorse and its driver, its interpretation in King Lear being a ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... a man "fourscore and upwards," like Lear, and like Lear, too, "mightily abused," about five feet seven, a little stooping, but still vigorous and alert; with a pleasant, fresh countenance, and the complexion of a middle-aged, plump, healthy woman, such as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as a redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... of joy, of patriotic enthusiasm, felt by every heart. A committee of twelve was appointed in town-meeting to superintend the reception. The president left his carriage at Greenland, at the residence of Colonel Tobias Lear, and mounted his favorite white horse; he was there met by Colonel Wentworth's troop, and on Portsmouth plains the president was saluted by Major General Cilly, and other officers in attendance. From the west end of the State House, on both sides of Congress Street, and into Middle Street, the citizens ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... kept our friends quiet by declining to move in a matter which was to expose us to the insult of a certain refusal. Clerk, with his usual felicity of quotation, said they should have remembered the Clown's exhortation to Lear, "Good nuncle, tarry and take the fool ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this—in Hamlet and King Lear—as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... exceedingly were these men. At the noise of them running to battle all Ireland shook, and the illimitable Lir [Footnote: Lir was the sea-god, the Oceanns of the Celt; no doubt the same as the British Lear, the wild, white-headed old king, who had such singular daughters; two, monsters of cruelty, and one, exquisitely sweet, kind, and serene, viz.: Storm, Hurricane, and Calm.] trembled in his watery halls; the roar of their brazen chariots ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... meagre suggestions a vital and impressive work of art. One thinks instinctively, in seeking for some adequate parallel, of what Goethe did with the materials of the Faust legend, or of what Shakespeare did with the indications offered for 'King Lear' and 'Cymbeline' by Holinshed's chronicle-history. And the two greatest names in modern literature are suggested not only by this general fact of creative power, but also more specifically by certain characters in the trilogy. Audhild, the Icelandic maiden ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... of the seventeenth century, between his thirty-seventh and forty-seventh year, he produced "Hamlet," "Measure for Measure," his part of "Pericles," "All's Well that Ends Well," "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Troilus and Cressida," "Cymbeline," "Coriolanus," and "Othello." These, with other works, were the fruit of his mind in its full maturity and vigor. Think of it a moment! what ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... I dropped to the floor in front of my bookcase. From across the room a hitburner seared the door and slashed sidewise, cutting a smoking swathe across my encyclopedia from A-AUD to CAN-DAN and then came down as I squirmed aside. It took King Lear right out of Shakespeare before the beam winked out. It went off just in time to keep me from sporting a cooked ...
— Stop Look and Dig • George O. Smith
... been my guardian angel ever since my blindness. She does all my writing, reads the plays and my notes to refresh my memory. She was reading King Lear this afternoon, and I was much stirred by the sad trials of the poor old king. I mentally compared my lot with his and found that the advantage is mine. He had no home, two ungrateful daughters, and, as far as I can learn, no ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... Between himself and Dion Boucicault a drama carrying all the possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his genius had been constructed. In the first act he sang a drinking song to a wing accompaniment delightfully, adding much to the tone and color of the situation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last act was an inspiration, his own and not Boucicault's. The weird scene in the mountains fell in admirably with a certain weird note in the Jefferson genius, and supplied the needed element ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... went through the Forest, sometimes by green rides, enchanted still, such as those down which Lancelot rode with Guinevere, talking of love, sometimes over heaths wild and desolate such as that which knew the bitterness of Lear, sometimes through the greenwood, ancient British woodland, silent now, where the hart was once at home in the shade, and where at every turn one might expect to come upon Rosalind in her boy's dress, and think to hear from some glade the words ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... outnumbering those of its own blood. It absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of thieves and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words with no pedigree like those of Lear, Carrol, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... now described, employing it in an impersonal acceptation, without a Nominative to it expressed. One or two examples will serve to exhibit the use and effect of this anomalous Tense:—Shuidh an ['o]g bhean air sgeir, is a s['u]il air an lear. Chunnaic i long a' teachd air barraibh nan tonn. Dh' aithnich i aogas a leannain, is chlisg a cridhe 'n a com. Gun mhoille gun tamh, buailear dh' fhios na traighe; agus faighear an laoch, 's a dhaoine m' a thimchioll. In English thus: ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... countenance in the plays of Shakspeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet's ruling passion? Or Othello's? Or Harry the Fifth's? Or Wolsey's? Or Lear's? Or Shylock's? Or Benedick's? Or Macbeth's? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example-Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... see Lear acted—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Himself has given us. Here is the picture—a palace, a table abundantly spread, lights and music, delight and banqueting, gladness and fulness, society and sustenance. The guests sit close and all partake. To be within means food, shelter, warmth, festivity, society; to be without, like Lear on the moor, is to stand the pelting of the storm, weary, stumbling in the dark, starving, solitary, and sad. Within is brightness and good cheer; without ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear, and his three Daughters, with the unfortunate Life of Edgar, Sonne and Heire to the Earl of Glocester, and his sullen and assumed Humour of Tom of Bedlam, by his Majestie's servants. First Edit. 4to. ib. 1608. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... I took delight In LEAR'S immortal Dong, Whose nose was luminously bright, Who sang a silvery song. He did not terrify the birds With strange and unpropitious words Of double-edged ontong; I'm sure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... Leyland's passionate conviction to support it. There is a passage in a letter of Branwell's to Leyland, the sculptor, written in 1845, where he says he is writing a three-volume novel of which the first volume is completed. He compares it with "Hamlet" and with "Lear". There is also Branwell's alleged statement to Mr. Grundy. And there is an obscure legend of manuscripts produced from Branwell's hat, before the eyes of Mr. Grundy, in an inn-parlour. Leyland argues freely from the antecedent probability suggested ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... both Charles Lamb and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the work was originally produced it had illustrations to which Lamb objected. His reference ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... stock company at the Boston Museum. He served with distinction in the Civil War as captain in the 28th Massachusetts infantry regiment. From 1867 to 1870, with John McCullough, he managed the California theatre, San Francisco. Among his many and varied parts may be mentioned Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard III., Wolsey, Benedick, Richelieu, David Garrick, Hernani, Alfred Evelyn, Lanciotto in George Henry Boker's (1823-1890) Francesca da Rimini, and James Harebell in The Man o' Airlie. He played Othello to Booth's Iago and Cassius ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... branded as traitors and villains, were single-minded, earnest, valiant men; and, as for even O'Flynn, and those worse than him, what was really the matter with them was, that they were too honest—they spoke out too much of their whole minds. Bewildered, like Lear, amid the social storm, they had determined, like him, to become "unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"—seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... lendings!' That is how Shakespeare lays the mind of man bare, and strips him of his pretences, to try if he be indeed noble. And he finds that man, naked and weak, hunted by misfortune, liable to all the sins and all the evils that follow frailty, still has faith left to him, and charity. King Lear is still every ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... we have room now for only one of those priceless sentences in which he has set the diamond and the pearl as they were never set before. No kingly diadem can boast such jewels as glow along these lines from "Lear":— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... hide a blush? He looks delighted; and I almost fancy I see a proud colour on his brow. As I gaze, these young people make for me a perfect idyl. The generous, ungrudging sun, the melancholy ruin, decked, like mad Lear, with the flowers and ivies of forgetfulness and grief, and between them, sweet and evanescent, human ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Puritan commentators has it: 'The tower is so deep that no pioneer can undermine it, so thick that no cannon can breach it, so high that no ladder can scale it.' 'The righteous runneth into it,' and is perched up there; and can look down like Lear from his cliff, and all the troubles that afflict the lower levels shall 'show scarce so gross as beetles' from the height where he stands, safe and high, hidden in the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... "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 ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... been very courteous towards the worsted gentry; had he lived in our times, they might have worsted him for a libel: he says in King Lear, "A base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three suited, hundred pound, filthy, worsted ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... and the culture coming of a few years' association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so easily into the actor-manager with a ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... yet only early afternoon; and the wind howled dismally over the hills of the heath—not improbably the same heath which had witnessed the agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear. Gertrude Lodge talked most, Rhoda replying with monosyllabic preoccupation. She had a strange dislike to walking on the side of her companion where hung the afflicted arm, moving round to the other when inadvertently near it. Much heather had been brushed by their feet when they descended ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... England wrung his hands. "I see you are resolved to drive me to distraction. This is the final stroke. My daughter wishes to desert me. Lear," he added, piteously, "was only a touch to me. You are Goneril and Regan ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... is turned into a vegetable person [the cornstalk is Lanier's symbol of the poet], and you give its poetry with many touches of marvel and mystery in vegetable life. Your third landscape takes for an instant the form and tragic state of King Lear; you thus make it seize on our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then restore it to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible beneficence in ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... may be seen all about us. In order to illustrate the situation baldly, and at the same time to put it dramatically, it may be well to take an instance concerning which we have no personal feeling. The tragedy of King Lear has been selected, although we have been accustomed so long to give him our sympathy as the victim of the ingratitude of his two older daughters, and of the apparent coldness of Cordelia, that we have not sufficiently considered the weakness ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... Lieutenant-Colonels Garland and Wilson, commanding brigades in General Twiggs' division; Colonels Mitchell, Campbell, Davis, and Wood, commanding the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and 2d Texas regiments, respectively; and Majors Lear, Allen, and Abercrombie, commanding the 3d, 4th, and 1st regiments of infantry; all of whom served under my eye, and conducted their commands with coolness and gallantry against the enemy. Colonel Mitchell, Lieutenant-Colonel McClung, Mississippi regiment, Major Lear, 3d Infantry, and Major Alexander, ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... 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 ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... old Minister Van de Lear's son, Calvin. He's going to succeed his venerable and pious poppy in Kensington ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... store, "Here learn," she said, "here learn the sacred lore;" This fancy realiz'd, the bard shall see, And his best commentator breathe in thee. She spoke: her magic powers the actor tried; Then Hamlet moraliz'd and Richard died; The dagger gleam'd before the murderer's eye, And for old Lear each bosom heav'd sigh; Then Romeo drew the sympathetic tear, With him and Cibber Love lay bleeding here. Enchanting Cibber! from that warbling throat No more pale Sorrow pours the liquid note. Her voice suppress'd, and Garrick's genius fled, Melpomene declined ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... Ireland, a-lookin' arter some marchant ships, and she took on board a pilot; well, he was a deep, sly, twistical lookin' chap, as you e'enamost ever seed. He had a sort of dark, down look about him, and a lear out of the corner of one eye, like a horse that's goin' to kick. The captain guessed he read in his face, 'Well now, if I was to run this here Yankee right slap on a rock and bilge her, the King would make a man of me for ever.' So, says he to the first leftenant, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... degree of perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creation of a nation's spirit; and the artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, but gave it form, and nothing but form. Nor would the form ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... should have so treated her, and as I didn't sleep any more than she did, though, owing to very different feelings about Elizabeth, I made up my mind as to some things I would say to her when she got back. And if she has never read "King Lear" I will see that she hears it read before very long with a glossary, and comments of my own on ingratitude and things of that sort. Also she may ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... tried to fly, and if he had succeeded there would have been no need for the Wright brothers to bother; but when he got as far as London from Bath the wing-strings broke and he fell, plop! on a particularly hard temple of Apollo. After him reigned his son, no less a person than King Lear. I got this out of a queer little old book I bought the first day we came, but I assumed the air of having known it since childhood. There's another legend, it seems, about Bladud and a swine, but it's less esoteric than this, and ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Just fancy a horse that comes full pelt, But as quiet as if he was shod with felt, Till he rushes against you with all his force, And then I needn't describe of course, While he kicks you about without remorse, How awkward it is to be groomed by a horse! Or a bullock comes, as mad as King Lear, And you never dream that the brute is near, Till he pokes his horn right into your ear, Whether you like the thing or lump it, - And all for want ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... 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 in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... belief. I have a letter in my pocket from a young friend in a country company, the ladies of which have their sensibility strung up to so fine a tone that he cannot take the tragedy of King Lear for his benefit, because not one of them will play either Regan or Goneril. If their feelings are so exquisite in the country, where our wise laws treat players as vagabonds, what must they be when loaded with all the legal, tragic, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... fortnight, until he was able to settle down comfortably in lodgings, in Dove Court, Mansion House. He was soon hard at work upon 'The Death of Rizzio,' adorning his walls with pictures he had brought with him or sent for afterwards from Kendal, such as 'King Lear,' 'Elfrida,' 'The Death of Lefevre,' and a few portraits of friends. The Rizzio picture has been represented as 'a work of extraordinary merit, combining energetic action with strong expression.' Its fate was sad enough; attracting no notice, producing no profit, and at length becoming an incumbrance ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... appear extravagant praise, but for its justice we confidentially appeal to the record. The plays which have most severely tried the sagacity of Shakspeare's critics, are Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello. We do not hesitate to say that Mr. Hudson's analysis and representation of these are the most thorough, accurate, and comprehensive which exist at present either in English or German. Compare him or these tragedies with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... the passage of these resolutions, a written message was received from the President, accompanying a letter from Mr. Lear, which he said, "will inform you that it had pleased Divine Providence to remove from this life our excellent fellow citizen, GEORGE WASHINGTON, by the purity of his life, and a long series of services to his country, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... pride and kindling love of home To the outer skies and seas of fire and foam, From splendour soft as dew that sundawn thrills To gloom that shudders round the world it fills, From midnights murmuring round Titania's ear To midnights maddening round the rage of Lear, The wonder woven of storm and sun became One with the light that lightens from his name. The music moving on the sea that felt The storm-wind even as snows of springtide melt Was blithe as Ariel's hand or voice might ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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
... grand air; and these grand nothings of theirs allure us just because they are nothings and make no demands upon our intelligence. That is art indeed, we cry: and we intoxicate ourselves with it because it is merely art. "The quality of mercy is not strained" is far more popular than Lear's speech, "No, no, no! Come, let's away to prison," because it is professional rhetoric; it is what Shakespeare could write at any moment, whereas the speech of Lear is what Lear said at one particular moment. The contrast between the two is the contrast well put in the epigram about Barry ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... people. Whereas, of all the shameful people (equally billions and not less bilious) that have presumed to quarrel with Milton, not one has thought him ludicrous, but only dull and somnolent. In 'Lear' and in 'Hamlet,' as in a human face agitated by passion, are many things that tremble on the brink of the ludicrous to an observer endowed with small range of sympathy or intellect. But no man ever found the starry heavens ludicrous, though many find them dull, and prefer a near view of a brandy ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... parsley, bruised with the back of a ladle, and give them two or three walms on the fire in the broth; then dish the chines in thin slices of fine French bread, broth them, and lay on them some boiled beef-marrow, boil'd in strong broth, some slic't lemon, and run all over with a lear made of beaten butter, the yolk of an egg or two, the juyce of two or three oranges, and ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... particularly in sky forms and tones, the expression and character are always such as support vigorously the action of his group. We say vigorously; for Mr. Rothermel, in his Italian pictures, revealed an artistic nature related to humanity in its most agitated moods, as in the "Lear," and in the "Saint Agnese,"—this beautiful picture being, however, a higher conception, inasmuch as in it the spirit might find some rest in the stillness of the maiden Agnese, already saint and about to be martyr, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... 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 was gone; he never ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... the math for the interplanetary ships? I did! Without me they would never have been built!" He turned dramatically, as though he were playing King Lear. "And what do I get for it?" He pointed an accusing finger at Arcot. "What do I get? He is called 'Earth's most brilliant physicist', and I, who did all the hard work, am referred to as 'his mathematical assistant'." He shook his head solemnly. ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... which, except a brief interregnum, he held until his death in March, 1820. He was greatly praised in his day, and doubtless thought himself a great artist. He painted a vast number of portraits and quite a number of pictures of classical and historical subjects. His "Lear" is in the Boston Athenaeum; his "Hamlet and Ophelia" is in the Longworth collection in Cincinnati; "Christ Healing the Sick" is in the Pennsylvania Hospital; and the "Rejected Christ" is or was owned by Mr. Harrison, of Philadelphia. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... fragrant, to the drawing-room; In hues as gay, and odours as divine, As the fair fields they sold to look so fine. "That's velvet for a king!" the flatterer swears 'Tis true, for ten days hence 'twill be King Lear's. Our Court may justly to our stage give rules, That helps it both to fools-coats and to fools. And why not players strut in courtiers' clothes? For these are actors too, as well as those: Wants reach all states; they beg but better drest, And all ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... sobered or restrained for evil or for good his half-barbaric genius. He flung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it now the cynicism of Measure for Measure, now the despair of Hamlet and of Lear, now the radiant magnanimity of the Tempest, and departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... testimony of the father. I find myself incapable of speaking of him or his testimony with severity. Unfortunate old man! Another Lear, in the conduct of his children; another Lear, I apprehend, in the effect of his distress upon his mind and understanding. He is brought here to testify, under circumstances that disarm severity, and call loudly for sympathy. Though ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... about converting, in some of his great plays, into a cosmos; and a sad muss, if not a ridiculous muss, they made of it. Signal examples of this are the 'rifacimenti' of the Tempest by Dryden and Davenant, the King Lear by Tate, and the Antony and Cleopatra (entitled 'All for Love, or the World well ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... declamation of English poetry by Akshay Chowdhury, our initiator into English literature, there was the wildness of intoxication. The frenzy of Romeo's and Juliet's love, the fury of King Lear's impotent lamentation, the all-consuming fire of Othello's jealousy, these were the things that roused us to enthusiastic admiration. Our restricted social life, our narrower field of activity, was hedged ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... something picturesque in the big, comfortable shoulders of the Cote. That delicate critic M. Emile Montegut, in a charming record of travel through this region published some years ago, praises Shakespeare for having talked (in "Lear") of "waterish Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point. I stopped at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque, but I might almost have seen the little I discovered without stopping. It is a drowsy Burgundian town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, vistas always oblique, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... thou simular man of virtue, Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. — Lear. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the Constitution frigate, Captain Preble, with Mr. Lear on board, was within two days' sail of Gibraltar, where the Philadelphia would then be arrived with her prize, and such explanations would probably be instituted as the state of things required, and as might perhaps arrest the progress ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... Bottom, with the ass's head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the insistence on the swarthiness of Othello, or the deformity of Richard III. Shakespeare's work is much more than picturesque; but it is picturesque. And the same ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Lear, King of Britain, had three daughters; Goneril, wife to the Duke of Albany; Regan, wife to the Duke of Cornwall; and Cordelia, a young maid, for whose love the King of France and Duke of Burgundy were joint suitors, and were at this time making stay ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... 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 shed, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... 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 Self, the King ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... account. The sameness of the chanson story, the almost invariable recurrence of the stock motives and frameworks—of rebellion, treason, paynim invasion, petulance of a King's son, somewhat too "coming" affection of a King's daughter, tyrannical and Lear-like impotentia of the King himself, etc.—may be exaggerated, but cannot be denied. In the greatest of all by general acknowledgment, the far-famed Roland, the economy of pure story interest is pushed to a point which in a less unsophisticated age—say the twentieth instead of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... With the elder Booth, subjected to the varying fortunes and excitements of the early American stage, the evil influence gained sad ascendency, and his finest renditions grew "out of tune and harsh." In depicting the pathetic frenzy of Lear, such actors as he and Kean, when at their best, can surpass all rivals; and the grotesque, darkly-powerful ideals of Richard and Shylock are precisely those in which they will startle us to the last, gathering new, though fitful, expressions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... dilettantism liked nothing better than those sudden leaps from society, and M. Egiste Brancadori, who kept the Marzocco, was one of those unconscious buffoons of whom he was continually in search in real life, one of those whom he called his "Thebans", in reference to King Lear. "I'll talk a word with this same learned Theban," cried the mad king, one knows not why, when he meets ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... Shakespeare's, or Lear's, Cliff at Dover is one of the first things to which the transatlantic up-channel traveller's attention is called. Blind old Gloster has thus ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... 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
... And with what your Mother left you will buy books and writing paper! As for my property—that's going to Jack. I've got the papers for that too. Not being an idiot I've saved out enough for myself—no Lear business for mine! Well, boy—I'm sorry you're a fool. But you've got what ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... 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
... iche as a dissyllable; vide his Poems passim. Ch'am, is I am, that is, ich am; ch'ill, is I will, ich will. See Shakespeare's King Lear, Act IV., Scene IV. What is very remarkable, and which confirms me greatly in the opinion which I here state, upon examining the first folio edition of Shakespeare, at the London Institution, I find that ch is ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... highest subjects, equally well-executed (which, however, rarely happens), are the best."[75] Though each is perfect in its kind, there can be no difficulty in deciding the question of greatness between "King Lear" and "The Comedy of Errors." "The greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions: for the power of imagination, in works of invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions, which are the subject of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, these are names indeed of something more than tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distance beyond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagination seems to melt or flow back into the sunrise, do we discern Prospero beside Miranda, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... too much of artificial tone and measured cadence, in the declamation of the theatre. The present writer well remembers being in conversation with Dr. Johnson, near the side of the scenes, during the tragedy of King Lear: when Garrick came off the stage, he said, "You two talk so loud, you destroy all my feelings." "Prithee," replied Johnson, "do not talk of feelings, Punch has no feelings." This seems to have been his settled opinion; admirable as Garrick's imitation ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Praetor, Consul, Proconsul, and Imperator, so as to get what he could of power and wealth and dignity in the scramble, was, I think, Caesar's purpose. The rest grew upon him. As Shakspeare, sitting down to write a play that might serve his theatre, composed some Lear or Tempest—that has lived and will live forever, because of the genius which was unknown to himself—so did Caesar, by his genius, find his way to a power which he had not premeditated. A much longer time is necessary for eradicating an idea from men's minds than a fact from their practice. This ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and "Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in "Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia. Berlioz en revanche was better appreciated in Germany than ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... lies, that His Holiness has been insulting us. Ancient Father of Christendom, under whose sheltering shadow once slept in peace for near a thousand years the now storm-tossed nations of Western and Central Christendom, couldst thou indeed, when turned out a houseless[47] fugitive like Lear upon a night of tempest, still retain aught of thy ancient prestige, and through the might of belief rule over those ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... in almost every case he had both the address and his reply, copied upon opposite pages of one of his folio letter-books, now in the Library of Congress. These copies are respectively in the handwriting of WASHINGTON's private secretaries, viz:—Major William Jackson: Tobias Lear: Bartholomew Dandridge ...
— Washington's Masonic Correspondence - As Found among the Washington Papers in the Library of Congress • Julius F. Sachse
... noted, a student of Bergson at the Ecole Normale—found his ideal in the great story of the young girl of Domremy who saved France when all the pomp and wisdom of generals had broken down. And in our own poetry has not Mr. Bottomley rewritten the Lear story, with the focus of power and interest transferred from the old king—left with not an inch of king in him—to a glorious ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... king grew old like Lear— His blood waxed chill, his beard grew gray; He changed his sceptre for a staff: And as the thoughtless children laugh To see him totter on his way, He knew his ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... a bad woman. Let people overburdened with credulity believe that she is bad," cried Doederlein, with the expression and in the tone and gesture of the royal Lear, and shook his Olympian locks. "The fact is that violence has been practised on her; she has been driven into ruin! Men have stolen the sweet love of my dearly beloved daughter through the use of vile tricks and artifices. Where is she, the unfortunate, betrayed child? With what is she clothing ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... of Shakspeare, and remember that I formerly misrepresented your opinion of Lear. Be pleased to write the paragraph as you would have it, and send it[335]. If you have any remarks of your own upon that or any other play, I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... lights went out, and all the dancers disappeared. The masquerade was over; and again, through the darkness, rose the plaintive "All's well!" And it kept ringing in my ears until it became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free. It was like the voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: "Never, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... one, the effect had been lessened by the fact that nothing has been left to the imagination. On the other hand there has, since Shakespeare, been nothing so fine as the treatment of Pere Fouan, that peasant King Lear, by his ungrateful family. It has been urged that Zola overdid the horrors of the situation and that no parent would have been so treated by his children. By a singular chance a complete answer to this objection may be found in a paragraph ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... 'History of Spanish Literature' may be found his touching letter to De Guzman at the Moorish court. He is, like Lear, poor and discrowned, but not like him, weak. His prelates have stirred up strife, his nobles have betrayed him. If Heaven wills, he is ready to pay generously for help. If not, says the royal philosopher, still, generosity and loyalty exalt the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Poor old 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 ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... Law, respect for. Lear's Estate. Legislature of Antigua. Letter to a Special Magistrate. License to marry. Licentiousness. Lighthouse. Lock-up house at St. John's. Lyon, E.B., Esq. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... is a real actor—of the traditional school, of course—but great, all the same. It has always seemed to me that his Lear was one of the fine performances of the stage to-day. But even Mantell has to travel halfway across the country every season; he couldn't stay in New York—no, nor in intellectual and appreciative Boston, either. And I doubt whether ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It is not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry. Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded thunder-stone" in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up Wilton's Virgilian "fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... faults, major or minor, juvenile or non-juvenile; wondrous, inasmuch as the author is still very young, not many years, indeed, in advance of his majority. There is exaggeration, we grant, in passages, but it is exaggeration as essential to the circumstances and the characters as Lear's insane language is to his madness, or Othello's turbid tide of figures to his jealousy. The hero—an enthusiast—speaks always in enthusiastic terms; but of extravagance we find little, and of absurdity or affectation none. Diffusion there ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... her time. She was once taken out to dinner by General Washington when he was President. Madam Hancock, whose husband had been President of the Continental Congress and Governor of Massachusetts, complained to General Washington's Secretary, Mr. Lear, that that honor belonged to her. The Secretary told General Washington, the next day, what she said. The General answered that it was his privilege to give his arm to the handsomest woman in the room. Whether the reply was communicated to Mrs. Hancock, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... was formerly a favourite pickle; hence the "dangerous trade" of the samphire gatherer ("King Lear," act iv. sc. 6) who supplied the demand. It was sold in the streets, and one of the old London cries was "I ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... watch them. A maid shewed us up stairs into a room damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table, and forms of the same kind; and out of a wretched bed started a fellow from his sleep, like Edgar in King Lear, 'Poor Tom's a-cold'. [Footnote: It is amusing to observe the different images which this being presented to Dr Johnson and me. The Doctor, in his Journey, compares ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... ruler of the Tuatha Dea, but was later reconciled when the daughter of Bodb Dearg was given to him as his wife. On her death, he married her sister, who transformed her step-children into swans.[304] Ler is the equivalent of the Brythonic Llyr, later immortalised by Shakespeare as King Lear. ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... therefore be new to most readers—Lamb writes very much in the manner in which Shakspeare's fools and jesters—in some respects the wisest and thoughtfullest characters in his works—talk. If his words be "light as air," they vent "truths deep as the centre." If the Fool in "Lear" had written letters to his friends and acquaintances, I think they would have marvellously resembled this epistle to Patmore; and if, in saying this, I compliment the Fool, I hope I do not derogate from the genius of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... forms. Codex Regius is an imperfect monument of a time of poetical energy in which old forms were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in the minds of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... only possible successor. On Iffland's death Devrient was summoned to Berlin, where he was for fifteen years the popular idol. He died there on the 30th of December 1832. Ludwig Devrient was equally great in comedy and tragedy. Falstaff, Franz Moor, Shylock, King Lear and Richard II. were among his best parts. Karl von Holtei in his Reminiscences has given a graphic picture of him and the "demoniac fascination" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... Nonsense. By Edward Lear. From the Tenth London Edition. With Many New Pictures and Verses. Philadelphia. Willis P. Hazard, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he was across the drift of Lethe in the darkness, but never for long together. Once he woke uneasily with a start and saw a flash. The crash followed as in one beat, and the rain was like the rain in King Lear. He was broadly awake now. Two carriers were nestling near him. He felt fearfully for his pipe, and almost mourned for it as washed away. He found it, and turned over with a happy sigh. 'Man's airy notions!' 'as in ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... rivers within their channels,—and to cause all things necessary for his people to be borne by the earth.' '(They told me I was everything. But when the rain came to wet me once, when the wind would not peace at my bidding,' says Lear, 'there I found them, there I smelt them out.)' This, in connection with the preceding anecdote, to which, in the opinion of this author, it comes properly so very near, may be classed of itself among the suggestive stories above referred to; but ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Verona houses. There is always feud where there is not understanding. There is eternal feud between those two camps of misunderstanding, age and youth. This play, written by a young man, shows the feud from the point of view of youth. The play of King Lear shows it from the point of view of age. This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... enemies in many a fight, who had sought battle in their behalf and heaped them with favors. His eyes saw the depth of that resignation which gave to God the one jewel that would have atoned for the horrid sufferings of the past. If he were free! He thought of old Lear moaning over dead Cordelia. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... He executed his infamous 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 flames. Cotemporary ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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
... the religious ideal cannot be conceived as possessing the whole soul, we cannot appreciate the religious passion of a John Inglesant; if revenge is no more than spite there can be no Hamlet, nor a Lear if arrogance is unmixed with love and honour. If, to-day, the passion of love is treated more often than any other emotion, that is probably because the one capacity for intense experience, which never seems to desert the human race, is the capacity to identify ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... attributing the founding of all the principal cities to some ruler of this line, the historian relates the story of King Leir, the founder of Leicester. As this monarch's life has been used by Shakespeare for one of his dramas,—the tragedy of "King Lear,"—and is familiar to all students of English literature, there is no need to outline Geoffrey of Monmouth's version ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... he, till he died, perhaps found rest. "Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?" O Lear, That a reason out of nature must turn them ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... helps a writer, for he could pass without incongruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: 'Give me "The Winter's Tale," "Daffodils that come before the swallow dare" but not "King Lear." What is "King Lear" but poor life staggering in the fog?' and the slow cadence, modulated with so great precision, sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater's 'Essays on the Renaissance:' 'It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... His sons, who, "by a word," might have saved him from the expulsion, penury, and wanderings he has undergone, had deserted his cause—had looked with indifferent eyes on his awful woes—had joined with Creon to expel him from the Theban land. They are the Goneril and Regan of the classic Lear, as Antigone is the Cordelia on whom he leans—a Cordelia he has never thrust from him. "When," says Oedipus, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to talk with entire sincerity,—I said,—always feels himself in danger of two things, namely,—an affectation of bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and actual rudeness. What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt to run to mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... through the channel of a letter from yourself to Mr. Lear, that M. Duplaine, Consul of France at Boston, has lately, with an armed force, seized and rescued a vessel from the officer of a court of justice, by process from which she was under arrest in his custody: and that he has in like manner, with an armed force, opposed and prevented the officer, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Germany, as if all trouble were over and all had been forgiven. We walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... in its precision and elegance, we shall understand what a task it must have been for him to keep up his correspondence. A little later he employed a young New Hampshire graduate of Harvard, Tobias Lear, who graduated in 1783, who served him as secretary until his death, and undoubtedly lightened the epistolary cares of the General. But Washington continued to carry on much of the letter-writing, especially the intimate, himself; and, like ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Chester. About the second case, that of Leicester, there is a slight difficulty, for it assumes in the Chronicle the form of Laegra ceaster, with an apparently intrusive letter; and the later Welsh writers seized upon the form to fit in with their own ancient legend of King Lear. Nennius calls it Cair Lerion; and that unblushing romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes it at once into Cair Leir, the city of Leir. More probably the name is a mixture of Legionis and Ratae, Leg-rat ceaster, the camp of the Legion at Ratae. This, again, grew into ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... those which are really fresh, abrupt and inventive in any age; and if we were asked what was the best proof of this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with all respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was to be found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of nonsense. 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose,' at least, is original, as the first ship and ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... allegorical pictures, and his immense and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph's coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing; and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or criticised ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... striking likeness to all this in the early days of the history of London. Apart from all legends of the Troy Novant, of Lud and Lear and that King Lucius who sanctified Cornhill, legends which have their counterpart in all the old histories of Rouen, there are almost as few relics of the fortified barrack on the Thames, or of the more ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... the text (of King Lear) as though it were all prose, and not occasionally written in poetic measure; whereas, blank verse can, and always should, be distinguishable from prose by proper modulations of the voice, which a listener with a nice ear and a cultivated taste could not mistake, nor, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sold, Which few pence had made too dear On its blank to have enscrolled Beatrice, Lucifer, or Lear! ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... century,[218] and found imitators, abbreviators and continuators. Among its early admirers it had that indefatigable reader of novels, William Shakespeare, who took from it several hints, especially from the story of the "Paphlagonian unkind king," which he made use of in his "King Lear."[219] Books were published under cover of Sidney's name, as "Sir Philip Sydney's Ourania";[220] others were given away bearing as an epigraph an adaptation of ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... is singular that these two Essays, which are as fine as anything of a similar nature in English criticism, should have been almost unnoticed (undiscovered, except by literary friends) until the year 1818, when Lamb's works were collected and published. The grand passage on "Lear" has caused the Essay on the Shakespeare Tragedies to be well known. Less known is the Essay on Hogarth, although it is more elaborate and critical; the labor being quite necessary in this case, as the pretensions of ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... "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 ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... life-story? Shakespeare alone, of men of genius of the first rank, seems to have learned comparatively few of his lessons in the school of suffering. But, possibly, if more were known of Shakespeare, it would be found that Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet are but the expressions of lessons learned as he fought ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... them sent home. They are for a poor woman and her suffering children, who live about a square from here in Lear's Court." Paul stood thoughtfully a moment before handing her the basket, and said—"That court has a very bad reputation; had I not better accompany you? I hope you will not consider my ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... fail greatly to interest the tender passions. If you have any doubts as to the propriety of their being three in number, I beg it of you to reflect that the immortal Shakespeare has introduced three daughters into his tragedy of King Lear, which has often drawn tears from the eyes of multitudes. The same author has likewise begun his tragedy of Macbeth with three witches; and Mr. Alexander Donaldson has resolved, that his collection of original poems by Scotch ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... relate many whimsical anecdotes of provincial actors whom he knew in the early part of his life. He said that an actor who was to perform the character of Kent in the play of "King Lear," had dressed himself like a doctor, with a large grizzle wig, having a walking-stick, which he held up to his nose, and a box under his arm. Being asked why he dressed the Earl of Kent in that manner, he said, "People mistake the character; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... bread, and dull as life in cells, O, scribes who dare forget how wild we are How human breasts adore alarum bells. You house us in a hive of prigs and saints Communal, frugal, clean and chaste by law. I'd rather brood in bloody Elsinore Or be Lear's fool, straw-crowned amid the straw. Promise us all our share in Agincourt Say that our clerks shall venture scorns and death, That future ant-hills will not be too good For Henry Fifth, or Hotspur, or Macbeth. Promise that through to-morrow's spirit-war Man's deathless ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... of this hotel, was the principal manager in the unloading of the records and furniture belonging to the government when the ships bringing it from Philadelphia docked at Lear's Wharf. Abraham Bradley, who, as Assistant Postmaster General, had charge of the removal of that department, and Joseph Nourse, who was Registrar of the Treasury, may also have stopped at Crawford's until ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... plays that could offend neither morality nor delicacy. There are many things upon the stage which are sinful, vicious, and vulgar, but there are hundreds of books quite as bad and dangerous. As we choose only the best volumes to read, so be sure to select only pure plays and operas. 'Lear' would teach you the awful results of filial disobedience; 'Merchant of Venice,' the sin of avarice; 'Julius Caesar' that of unsanctified ambition. There are threads of wisdom, patience, charity, and heroism which might be gathered from the dramatic spindle, and woven advantageously ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... outbreaks, which a sense of the wicked injustice of their fate, and seeing their own offspring brought up in evidence against them, through the most detestable acts, and by the basest subornation, would naturally extort from minds even of iron mould. If ever Lear's or Timon's power of malediction could be justifiably called into exercise, it would be against such a tribunal and such witnesses as ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... contents, he finds each contribution well worth the setting. For a leading article we have something that is well nigh unique in literature, either amateur or professional, an attempted reconstruction of a scene supposedly excised from "King Lear." This is so unusual, in fact, that it might well be called a "stunt," but certainly it is a successful stunt. In the not overly long scene presented, which pictures the ruthless hanging of Cordelia and the Fool before the eyes of the aged Lear, we can discern no quality that ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... school at Stratford they pointed out to her the desk at which Shakespeare sat as a lad, with all its boyish hieroglyphics, and her thought instinctively leaped across the years to "The Tempest," "King Lear," and "Hamlet." She pondered deeply the relation between the activities of the lad and the behavior of the man, wondering how much the school had to do with the plays that stand alone in literature, and whether he imbibed the power from associations, from books, from people, or from ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... gaun, ye broken men?' Quo' fause Sakelde; 'come tell to me!' Now Dickie of Dryhope led that band, And the never a word of lear had he. ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... say ignominious! Stupid pride is one of the symptoms of madness. Of the two madmen mentioned in Don Quixote, one thought himself NEPTUNE, and the other JUPITER. Shakspeare agrees with CERVANTES; for, Mad Tom, in King Lear, being asked who he is, answers, 'I am a tailor run mad with pride.' How many have we heard of, who claimed relationship with noblemen and kings; while of not a few each has thought himself the Son of God! To the public journals, and to ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... lass," said Will to himself; "ye little ken that the Laird o' Gilnockie, whom ye tried to deprive of his birthright, sits afore ye; and will a' the lear 'neath that big wig tell ye that that same Laird o' Gilnockie sits here contriving a plan to run awa wi' ye? Faith, an' it's a bauld project; but the baulder the bonnier, as we say in Liddesdale. I only wish I could tak ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... 1606-7, when the people died of hunger in the very streets of the town, and for the space of seven months there was no rain. We know at any rate that Romeo and Juliet was brought out at Dresden in 1613, along with Hamlet and King Lear, and it was surely to none other than Willie Hughes that in 1615 the death-mask of Shakespeare was brought by the hand of one of the suite of the English ambassador, pale token of the passing away of the great poet who had so dearly loved him. Indeed there ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... seem to make it an almost hopeless task now to discover the causes of his insomnia. He wrote a marvellous body of literature, and it might be thought this labor itself would suffice as an explanation: that the furnace heat in which the conceptions of Hamlet and Macbeth and Lear were wrought in the crucible of his brain would be fatal to repose. But his contemporaries speak of him as an easy and rapid writer; one whose imagination is only paralleled by the ease, the force and beauty of the phrase in which ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... 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 ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... not above broad farce when the fancy seized him. At the time when a certain kind of nonsense verse was popular, he, with Sir Noel Paton and others, added not a few facetious sonnets to Edward Lear's book, which lay on Madame Novikoff's table. His authorship is betrayed by the introduction of familiar Somersetshire names, Taunton, Wellington, Curry Rivel, ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... induced, without much persuasion, to join the rest of the party at dinner. In the evening, all (Fairthorn excepted) draw round the fire. Waife is entreated by George to read a scene or two out of Shakespeare. He selects the latter portion of "King Lear." Darrell, who never was a playgoer, and who, to his shame be it said, had looked very little into Shakespeare since he left college, was wonderstruck. He himself read beautifully—all great orators, I suppose, do; but his talent ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ever-increasing violence, until it seemed that even the stalled car would be compelled to yield to its force. Claire had never seen it rain harder; the storm had a vindictive fury that reminded her of the dreadful tempest in "King Lear." ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... virtue ought not to suffer in a tragedy, is not well considered: Monimia in the Orphean, Belvidera in Venice Preserved, Athenais in Theodosius, Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear, Desdemona in Othello, Hamlet, (to name no more,) are instances that a tragedy could hardly be justly called a tragedy, if virtue did not temporarily suffer, and vice for a while triumph. But he recovers ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... into sympathy with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in Hamlet, breathe the bracing Highland air in Macbeth, the air of the woods in As You Like It; the storm on the heath roars through Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... usurped its throne, and ever since the maddened old creature, with hoary crest of foam, wails and laments continually, like King Lear exposed to the fury ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... the emotions was adjudged bucolic, nay, Madam, the Eumenides were very terrifying at Delphi, no doubt, but deck them with paint, patch, and panniers, send them howling among the beau monde on the Pantiles, and they are only figures of fun; nor may, in reason, the high woes of a second Lear, or of a new Prometheus, be adequately lighted by the flambeaux of ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell |
