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Prologue  v. t.  (past & past part. prologued; pres. part. prologuing)  To introduce with a formal preface, or prologue. (R.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Prologue" Quotes from Famous Books



... the scene of a European drama, of rival principalities and potentates avid of world control—a family tragedy of the related rulers of France, Germany, Burgundy and Savoy. By his delegated rule of the latter country, Francois de Gruyere, although playing his part only in the prologue, took his place beside the great figures of the Emperor Ferdinand of Germany, Louis XI of France, the Duchess Yolande and their magnificent cousin Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Sent by his father, Charles VII of France, at the head of the redoubtable Armagnacs, to help the German emperor ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven

... and all hands take a drink at the other fellow's invitation, for which the great Corkey demands the privilege of paying. With this prologue the crowds start ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern

... whim of originality, he had departed from the model, he would certainly have fared worse. Thus, my Mephistopheles sings a song from Shakespeare, and why should he not? Why should I give myself the trouble of inventing one of my own, when this said just what was wanted. If, too, the prologue to my Faust is something like the beginning of Job, that is again quite right, and I am rather to be praised ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... In his prologue "excusynge the rudenes of his translacion," he professes to have purposely used the most ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt

... piece of insulting hypocritical cant I never read. Where's your note to Lady Florence? Your compliments, you will be with her at two. There, now the rehearsal's over, the scenes arranged, and I'll dress, and open the play for you with a prologue." ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the Duke's Theatre in Dorset-Garden; for, being a satire upon a court vice, it was deemed peculiarly calculated for that play-house. The concourse of the citizens thither is alluded to in the prologue to "Marriage-a-la-Mode." Ravenscroft also, in his epilogue to the "Citizen turned Gentleman," acted at the same theatre, disowns the patronage of the courtiers who kept mistresses, probably because they Constituted the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... cry of the town, nemine contradicente but the conceited poet. He says in his prologue that 'this is the last the town must expect from him;' he had done himself a kindness had he taken his leave before." He then describes the success of Southerne's Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery, and concludes, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... 1866. In childhood she knew the narrowness and darkness of poverty. Made her first appearance as an actress at the opening performance of Ole Bull's theater in Bergen, January 2, 1850, when she also recited the Prologue. An attractive personality, a voice clear and flexible both in speech and song, and unusual mentality made her the most talented actress of her time in Norway. Her power was comprehensive; she began with romantic parts and always liked these best, though later she was ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... The prologue to this somewhat dramatic history was of the simplest. The affair came to a climax, if one may speak metaphorically, in fire and sword and high passion, but it began like the month of March. Mr Bostock ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... names, as are likewise the poets Henryson, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lyndsay. But the authors of the songs of the people have been forgotten. In a droll poem entitled "Cockelby's Sow," ascribed to the reign of James I., is enumerated a considerable catalogue of contemporary lyrics. In the prologue to Gavin Douglas' translation of the AEneid of Virgil, written not later than 1513, and in the celebrated "Complaynt of Scotland," published in 1549, further catalogues of the popular songs have ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Harrison's Historical Description of the Island of Great Britain, and Pepys's account of his tour in the summer of 1668. The excellence of the English inns is noticed in the Travels ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... share with me such foot-notes as may be made on the pages of my life during this summer's wanderings, I should not be quite silent as to this magnificent prologue to the, as yet, unknown drama. Yet I, like others, have little to say where the spectacle is, for once, great enough to fill the whole life, and supersede thought, giving us only its own presence. "It is good to be here," is the best as the ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... Wine requires no Bush, they say, And I, No Prologue such a Play: The Makers therefore did forbeare To have that Grace prefixed here. But cease here (Censure) least the Buyer Hold thee in this a vaine Supplyer. My office is to set it forth When Fame applauds it's ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... was carted first about the streets, For false position in his neighbour's sheets: Next, hanged for thieving: now the people say, His carting was the prologue to this play. ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... making that day went without a hitch. Mr. Hooley sent several men into the woods above the spot on the shore of the "Kingdom of Pipes," as Helen insisted upon calling the island where the prologue of the picture was made, and they remained on watch there during the activities of ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson

... assembly in March, at the capital Ticinum. The importance of this concurrence of the judices in all the king's decrees and official acts is illustrated by the fact that cases are rare in which this concurrence remains unmentioned. The usual practice is to introduce in the prologue which is commonly attached to the laws given out during each year of the king's reign, after the mention of the date "Kalendiis Martiarum," some such expression as "cum nostris Judicibus";[17] or "ad nos conjungerentur Judices";[18] or "per suggestionem Judicum";[19] ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams

... only possible to excuse the milk-and-watery treatment of the subject through the general mental cowardice and ignorance in intellectual matters which is so predominant in this country. I find a comfort in the hope that this article is the prologue to able exegetical works, combined with a concrete statement of the absurdity, the untruth, and untenableness of the present English conception of inspiration. Do not call me to account too sharply for this hope, or it is likely to evaporate simply ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... with Emerson is that he stops in the ante-chamber of poetry. He is content if he has brought us to the hypnotic point. His prologue and overture are excellent, but where is the argument? Where is the substantial artistic content that ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... enough. For men, in distinction from animals, live in a world of ideas as well as in a realm of immediate reality. This world of ideas is something more than the mirror that sense-perception offers us; something less than that ultimate reality to which it seems to be a prologue and invitation. Man, in his ambition to be master of himself and of nature, looks behind the mirror, to analyze phenomena and seek causes, in order to gain control. Science, natural science, is a research for causes, that is to say, for mechanisms, which in turn find application ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... question, or listen to a question about that. It is a certainty. Receive it on my judgment. It is a sort of prologue to the play, a motto to the chapter; and will be ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... versifier is hugely the superior of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his more delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely his inferior. But let us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was ambidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour's Prologue to the Second Part of Henry IV., a fine flourish of eloquence in Shakespeare's second manner, and set it side by side with Falstaff's praise of sherris, act iv. scene iii.; or let us compare the beautiful prose spoken throughout ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Ladies, that it is impossible for either of them to take Offence. I hope I may be forgiven, that I have not made my Opera throughout unnatural, like those in vogue; for I have no Recitative; excepting this, as I have consented to have neither Prologue nor Epilogue, it must be allowed an Opera in all its Forms. The Piece indeed hath been heretofore frequently represented by ourselves in our Great Room at St. Giles's, so that I cannot too often acknowledge your Charity in bringing it now ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay

... prologue to the tragedy. Bear with me while I relate it. (Mr. Braham takes out a handkerchief, unfolds it slowly; crashes it in his nervous hand, and throws it on the table). Laura grew up in her humble southern home, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... prologue, he engaged himself in the ever-pleasurable task of delivering a long, congratulatory address. If there was one thing above another that the Grand Duke enjoyed, it was the making of a speech. He prided himself on ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... and the moist starre, Vpon whose influence Neptunes Empier stands Was sicke almost to doomesday with eclipse. And euen the like precurse of feare euents As harbindgers preceading still the fates And prologue to the Omen comming on Haue heauen and earth together demonstrated ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald

... joyous sport for I do not know how long a time; we were excited by the noise of the storm and we whirled around like little dervishes; it was a merry-making in celebration of my return; it was a fitting way of inaugurating the holidays; it was a defiance to the Big Ape, and it was an appropriate prologue to the series of expeditions and childish sports of every kind that were to recommence, with more ardor than ever, the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... Garden was probably not Handel but Mlle Salle, a French dancer who had been engaged by Rich. The first performance at the new theatre was a ballet, Terpsichore, in order that she might inaugurate the season. Terpsichore, which includes songs and a chorus, served as prologue to Il Pastor Fido. The next opera was Oreste, a pasticcio made up by Handel himself from his own works; on January 8, 1735, he produced his Ariodante, an opera over which he had spent the unusually long time of ten weeks. ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent

... plunge into the middle of things; but he spends comparatively little time on the preliminaries of the ironical Prologue to the "very illustrious drinkers," on the traditionally necessary but equally ironical genealogy of the hero, on the elaborate verse amphigouri of the Fanfreluches Antidotees, and on the mock scientific discussion of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... the while to refuse it? Exhausted, drained, dispeopled, they may chain a vassal province to their throne; but, woe be to them, upon that conquering day, their glory has departed from them! The first Revolution was but the prologue to this: that was sealed in blood; in this might have been demonstrated the progress made under eighty years of freedom, by a peaceful separation. It is the Flight of the Tartar Tribe anew, and the whole barbarous Northern nation pours its hordes after, hangs on the flank, harasses, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... publication of size, although he was labouring on when death surprised him, and within the last three weeks of his life had written the "Secular Margin," and the prologue and the epilogue to Fletcher's "Pilgrim,"—productions remarkable as showing the ruling passion strong in death,—the squabbling litterateur and satirist combating and kicking his enemies to the last,—Jeremy Collier, for having accused him of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... dramas is the unfinished pastoral comedy, "The Sad Shepherd." It was written while in the sick-chamber, with a keen sense and remembrance of the disappointments which had followed him through life; and to these he touchingly refers in the prologue: ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin

... of ingratitude. But in the bard's city life there was an unnatural element. He stooped to beg for neither smiles nor favour, but the gnarled country oak is cut up into cabinets in artificial prose and verse. In the letters to Mr Graham, the prologue to Mr Wood, and the epistles to Clarinda, he is dancing minuets with hob-nailed shoes. When, in 1787, the second edition of the Poems came out, the proceeds of their sale realized for the author L400. On the strength of this sum he gave himself two long rambles, full of poetic material—one ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... a' in ae breath," said Geordie, who wanted a prologue, to give him time to consider how much he could say, so as to serve the two purposes of safety and drawing out the woman at the same time. "It's no quite fair, to an ignorant man like me, to put sae mony questions at a time; but it's my wish to serve ye, an' I'll do my best ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... of all the neighboring world. It was the destiny of Sicily to make and unmake the fortunes of ancient Carthage. Ceylon, from the dawn of history, lured traders who enriched and conquerors who oppressed peninsular India. The advance of Spain to the Canary Isles was the drowsy prologue to the brilliant drama of American discovery. The island of Tsushima in the Korean Strait was seized by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1280 as the base of their attack upon Japan;[875] and when in 1857 the Russian bear tried to plant a foot on this island, Japan saw danger ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... Like It, Rosalind, speaking the Epilogue, justifies the novelty of the proceeding:—"It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue."—Flavia is the earliest example, so far as ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen

... the way of prologue. On an evening rather later in the same week, Mr Edward Dunning was returning from the British Museum, where he had been engaged in research, to the comfortable house in a suburb where he lived alone, tended by two excellent women who had been long with him. There is nothing to be added by way ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James

... for a heigh tener; but their maxim was, that it was an impertinent mixture, and dashed the cup so as to spoil the sincere draught of pleasure; they considered it accordingly as their mortal enemy, and gave it no quarter wherever they met with it. This was a prologue not unworthy of ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland

... B prints the Prologue and Epilogue to The Captaine as though they belonged to Beggars Bush, apparently treating the last page of The Captain in A as though it were the first page ...
— Wit Without Money - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher • Francis Beaumont

... ass, must be making himself a public laughingstock, and have no thank for his labour; where other Magisterii, whose invention is far more exquisite, are content to sit still and do nothing. I'll show you what a scurvy Prologue he had made me, in an old vein of similitudes: if you be good fellows, give it the hearing, that you ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... quiet and immemorially ancient town, massacred the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Melos fell in the autumn of 416 B.C. The Troaedes was produced in the following spring. And while the gods of the prologue were prophesying destruction at sea for the sackers of Troy, the fleet of the sackers of Melos, flushed with conquest and marked by a slight but unforgettable taint of sacrilege, was actually preparing to set sail for ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides

... secretly he could scarcely contain his impatience at the obstacles still in the way of his own elevation. He appears upon the stage, just after the crowning of Edward, burning with repressed hate and jealousy. The prologue is the utterance of the most intense bitterness and satire.' Then, unconsciously assuming the character, Mr. Lincoln repeated, also from memory, Richard's soliloquy, rendering it with a degree of force and power that made it seem like ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... Raymond is a novel which has been sensationally successful in England. It is a war story and I will give you some of the opening paragraphs of the "Prologue by Padre Monty": ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... which, according to custom for time out of mind, has always entitled the operator to that distinction. The predecessor of Dun was Gregory Brandon, from whom the gallows was called the Gregorian tree, by which name it is mentioned in the prologue to Mercurius Pragmaticus, tragi-comedy acted ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.

... Coverdale borrowed largely from the German interpreters, as was acknowledged on the title-page and in the prologue to the Bible of 1535. Thus Tyndale copied not only most of the marginal notes of Luther's Bible, but also such Teutonisms as, "this is once bone of my bone," "they offered unto field-devils" (Luther, "Felt-teuffem"), "Blessed is the room-maker, Gad" (Luther, "Raum-macher"). ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... of being shed, made them bless their own obscurity. Already had tumultuous scenes and conspicuous assassinations proved the monarch's weakness, the absence and approaching end of the minister, and, as a kind of prologue to the bloody comedy of the Fronde, sharpened the malice and even fired the passions of the Parisians. This confusion was not displeasing to them. Indifferent to the causes of the quarrels which were abstruse for them, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... cruelty! * * * * * Poor, poor Cydilla! was it then to this That all my tale was prologue? Think of Amyntas, think of that poor boy, Bereaved as we are both bereaved! Come, come, Find him, and say that Love himself has sent us To offer our poor service in ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... musical, musical comedy. [movies] western, horse opera; flick [coll.]; spy film, love story, adventure film, documentary, nature film; pornographic film, smoker, skin flick, X-rated film. act, scene, tableau; induction, introduction; prologue, epilogue; libretto. performance, representation, mise en scene[French], stagery[obs3], jeu de theatre[French]; acting; gesture &c. 550; impersonation &c. 554; stage business, gag, buffoonery. light comedy, genteel comedy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... Arbor, she leaues him: Then enters Luci- anus with poyson in a Viall, and powres it in his eares, and goes away: Then the Queene commmeth and findes him dead: and goes away with the other. Ofel. What meanes this my Lord? Enter the Prologue. Ham. This is myching Mallico, that meanes my chiefe. Ofel. What doth this meane my lord? Ham. You shall heare anone, this fellow will tell you all. Ofel. Will he tell vs what this shew meanes? Ham. I, or any shew you'le shew him, Be not afeard to shew, hee'le not be afeard to tell: ...
— The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke - The First ('Bad') Quarto • William Shakespeare

... time, Martinez Ruiz published a comedy, The Power of Love, for which I provided a prologue, and I went about with the publisher, Rodriguez Serra, through the bookshops, peddling the book. In a shop on the Plaza de Santa Ana, Rodriguez Serra asked the proprietor, not altogether without a ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... clear up the uncertainties which have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond all doubt, a genuine Hebrew-original, completed by its writer almost in the form in which it now remains to us. The questions on the authenticity of the Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought important, have given way before a more sound conception of the dramatic unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an inquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources of modern ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... things of life are simple to understand and easy to express, the littlenesses require a vast number of details to explain them. The foregoing events, which may be called a sort of prologue to this bourgeois drama, in which we shall find passions as violent as those excited by great interests, required this long introduction; and it would have been difficult for any faithful historian to shorten the account of ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... into any life with any pomp of circumstance or ceremony; there is no overture to our opera, no prologue to our play, and the most momentous meetings occur as if by mere accident. A friend delayed Cornelia a while on the street; and turning, she met Hyde face to face; a moment more, or less, and the meeting had not been. Ah, but some Power had set that ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr

... betel-nut quid, and have offered a drink of sugarcane brew or other beverage to the household, and have discussed a few topics of daily life—it may be about the last wild boar killed, or the capture of a polecat in the snares[1]—the prologue begins. This lasts from one to two days, including often the better part of the nights. Each of the visitors comes in his turn and rattles off, with many a significant haw and cough, in good Manbo style a series of periphrastic platitudes and examples that apparently give no ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... artful preparation for and relation to what it precedes. It shows the forethought and skill of its author in the construction or opening out of his play, both in respect to the story and the feeling; yet even here, in this half-declamatory prologue, the poet's dramatic art is also evident. His poet and painter are living men, and not mere utterers of so many words. Was this from intuition?—or because he found it easy to make them what he conceived them, and felt that it would add to the life of his introduction, though ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... be discerned in the direct mention by Shakespeare in 'Henry V' of an exciting episode in current history. In the prologue to act v. Shakespeare foretold for Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, the close friend of his patron Southampton, an enthusiastic reception by the people of London when he should come home after 'broaching' ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... reflection of an entire life, generally that of one isolated, or bereft by death or exile of protectors and friends." (Ten Brink, Early Eng. Lit.,I.) Iadopt Brooke's threefold division (Early Eng. Lit., p.356): "It opens with a Christian prologue, and closes with a Christian epilogue, but the whole body of the poem was written, it seems to me, by a person who thought more of the goddess Wyrd than of God, whose life and way of thinking were uninfluenced by ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... Launcelot into the Lake Head Piece—Prologue Tail Piece—Prologue Sir Launcelot greets Queen Guinevere Head Piece—The Story of Launcelot Sir Lionel of Britain Queen Morgana appears unto Sir Launcelot Sir Launcelot doeth battle with Sir Turquine Sir Launcelot sits with Sir Hilaire and Croisette Sir Launcelot and ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle

... tinged the eastern sky at the water's edge; and that water blushed; now the streaks turned orange, and the waves below them sparkled. Thence splashes of living gold flew and settled on the ship's white sails, the deck, and the faces; and with no more prologue, being so near the line, up came majestically a huge, fiery, golden sun, and set ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... a perfect gem of Greek art; even in the English Version it loses little, if anything, of its literary charm. As a prologue it is regarded as unsurpassed for brevity, modesty, and dignity. However, its value lies not in its beauty but in its testimony to the veracity of the writer and to the historic worth and absolute credibility ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman

... Now, in the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" we know that the observations could not have been recorded except at complete hours, because the construction of the metre will not admit the supposition of any parts of hours having ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various

... did the Epilogue of the Tragedy of Errors appear. The despatches, with the memorandum "not necessarily for publication," were published in full, as well as the "Secret Orders" given to Warren at Springfield, which were its Prologue. ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... that's just the prologue. That's just what you're supposed to know before the Curtain goes up. Now, am I going on to the drama or are we going to bed.... The drama? Right. You're a lewd fellow of the baser sort, but you occasionally have wise instincts. Right. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... lines no doubt saw reports of both affairs in the papers, but few, I expect, will recollect the actual facts, or if they do, they little dream of the remarkable romance of life of which those two unexplained tragedies formed the prologue. ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux

... has behaved admirably. If other women were wise enough to draw back at the last moment there would be fewer unhappy marriages. But Lady Mabel's elopement is only the prologue ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... Our prologue outstays its time. Already the captain of our pirates puts on his hook. The evil Duke limps for practice on his wooden leg. Presently our curtain will rise. We shall see the pirates' cabin, with the lighthouse in the distance, ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks

... colonel was right," said Happy Tom, "and this must have been a sort of prologue. But if the prologue was so hot what's the ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Chaucer's greatest work is the Canterbury Tales. It is a collection of stories written in heroic metre— that is, in the rhymed couplet of five iambic feet. The finest part of the Canterbury Tales is the Prologue; the noblest story is probably the Knightes Tale. It is worthy of note that, in 1362, when Chaucer was a very young man, the session of the House of Commons was first opened with a speech in English; and in the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... quality, if not quantity, of disappointment as those other sublime things, and we earnestly entreat the reader to guard himself against expecting anything considerable from it. Probably the inexperienced reader has imagined from our weighty prologue something of signal importance to follow; but the reader who has been our reader through thick and thin for many years will have known from the first that we were not going to deal with anything more vital, say, than a few emotions and memories, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... things abound in it, nor do they corrupt any of those things which seem to have been well done, or spoil their grace. But all human affairs are replete with vice, and the whole life, from the very prologue and beginning to the end, being disordered, depraved, and disturbed, and having no part of it pure or irreprehensible (as these men say), is the most filthy and most ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... evolutions, and the little prologue, in which the showman made a humorous eulogium of his troop, praising their indifference to applause and hisses, and their single devotion to their art, were the only circumstances in the whole affair that you could fancy would so much as raise a smile. But ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson

... roof? Not so. I still loathed my bed in the school dormitory more than words can express: I clung to whatever could distract thought. Somehow I felt, too, that the night's drama was but begun, that the prologue was scarce spoken: throughout this woody and turfy theatre reigned a shadow of mystery; actors and incidents unlooked-for, waited behind the scenes: I thought so foreboding told me ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... author of several theological books, and he also wrote the prologue to the second edition of the 'Great Bible,' printed in 1540. His works were collected and arranged by H. Jenkyns, and published in four volumes at Oxford in 1833. There is a portrait of the Archbishop, at the age of fifty-seven, by G. Fliccius in the National Portrait ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher

... fitly close with some verses that Mickiewicz wrote as an epilogue for Pan Tadeusz, but which he never finally revised and which were never printed during his lifetime. Since his death they have most frequently been inserted as a prologue to the poem ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... was removed to Constantinople in 397. The fifteen (or, if with some editors we include the prologue, sixteen) homilies On the Epistle to the Philippians, (t. 11, p. 189,) were preached in that capital of the empire. The moral instructions turn mostly on alms and riches. The order which prudence prescribes in the distribution of alms, he explains, (Hom. 1, t. 11, p. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... wrote the prologue I was asked to write. I did not see the play, though. I knew there was a young lady in it, and that somebody was in love with her, and she was in love with him, and somebody (an old tutor, I believe) wanted to interfere, and, very naturally, the young lady ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... scene of things as the sole object of their contemplation, so far reverse the whole course of nature, as to render this life merely a passage to something further; a porch, which leads to a greater and vastly different building; a prologue which serves only to introduce the piece, and give it more grace and propriety? Whence, do you think, can such philosophers derive their idea of the gods? From their own conceit and imagination surely. For if they derive it from the present phenomena, it would never point to anything ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... Two Thousand Years, was published in 1726. In his latter days he suffered from two grievous calamities, poverty and blindness. In 1733 Vanbrugh's play, The Provoked Husband, was acted for his benefit, and his old enemy Pope wrote the prologue, of which the sarcasm is more conspicuous than the kindness. There is a story, to which allusion is made in the Dunciad, that Dennis had invented some kind of theatrical thunder, and how, being once present at a tragedy, he fell into a great passion because his art had been appropriated, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... lothe, a nedeless correction. It is more likely that Absolon knocked than that he coughed at the window. Surrye or Russye, indifferent which. Cambuscan is Caius canne. "That may not saye naye," better than "there may no wighte say naye." Theophraste, not Paraphraste. The wife of Bath's Prologue taken from the author of Policraticon. Country, not Couentry. Maketh, not waketh. Hugh of Lincoln. "Where the sunne is in his ascensione," agood reading. Kenelm slain by Queen Drida. Master Speight mistaketh his almanack. The degrees of the signe are misreckoned, not the signe itself. Mereturicke ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne

... many a Jacke of Dover hast thou sold, That hath been twies hot and twies cold. Chaucer: The Coke's Prologue. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... seen Professor Max Muller's opinions in general about this, so to say, the Prologue to the Buddhist Drama with Vijaya as the hero—what has he to say as to the details of its plot? What weapon does he use to weaken this foundation-stone of a chronology upon which are built and on which depend all other ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... good offices of Sir Walter Scott, was brought out at the Edinburgh Theatre. She visited Scott, in Edinburgh, in 1808, and in the following year the Family Legend was played in that city fourteen nights in succession. Scott wrote for it a prologue, and Mackenzie, the author of The Man of Feeling, contributed an epilogue. The same piece was performed in London in 1814. The only "Play of the Passions" ever represented on a stage was De Montfort, first brought out by John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... mouth of a third person, who himself knows great part of them only at second-hand, and voluntarily related by him to one with whom his acquaintance is scarcely of an hour's standing. This mode of narration, in which one of the characters is introduced (like the prologue in an old play) to recount the previous adventures of the others, is in itself at all times defective; since it injures the effect of the relation by depriving it of those accessory touches which the author, from his conventionally admitted insight into the feelings and motives of his characters, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... and provide just the right touches of local color. Ready at hand was Aunt Dilsey; he would make her, unwittingly so far as she kenned, a supporting member of the cast. She would never know it, but she would play an accessory part, small but important, in his prologue. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... describes the robber life at Seville at the period in which he lived. All of these romances possess their peculiar merit, and will doubtless always be considered valuable, and be read as faithful pictures of scenes and habits which now no longer exist. In the prologue, the author states that his principal motive for publishing a work written in so strange a language was his observing the damage which resulted from an ignorance of the Germania, especially to the judges and ministers of justice, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... kept the mysterious playwright so long fumbling behind the scenes, for it was obvious that it would be no ordinary sort of play, no every-day domestic drama, that would satisfy this young lady, to whom life had given, by way of prologue, the inestimable blessing of wealth, and the privilege, as a matter of course, of choosing as she would among the grooms (that is, the bride-grooms) of ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... English poets does high honor to this star of the meadow in the "Prologue to the Legend ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... were the fruit of analysis; the final synthesis had yet to be accomplished. This was the scope of the 'Summa Theologica,' a work which, though it was not completed, is the greatest production of Thomas Aquinas. In the prologue he says:— ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... consists of eleven large folio sheets separately mounted and measuring eighteen by ten inches. It commences with a prologue, with the arms of Portugal supported by two savages, having clubs and shields. Outside the inner frame are three scenes: (1) wild animals in combat; (2) a sea-nymph being rescued; (3) a fight among sylvan savages. ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... Prologue] For als moche as the Lond bezonde the See, that is to seye, the Holy Lond, that men callen the Lond of Promyssioun, or of Beheste, passynge alle othere Londes, is the most worthi Lond, most excellent, and Lady and Sovereyn of alle othere Londes, and is blessed and halewed of the precyous Body ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt

... was the freedom of Switzerland and the formation of that vigorous Swiss confederacy which has maintained itself until the present day in the midst of the powerful and warlike nations which have surrounded it. The prologue given, we must proceed with the main scenes of the drama, which ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris

... what might be termed the prologue to the grand tragedy which was about to be performed in an amphitheatre of many square miles, and to the catastrophe of which we looked forward with an anxiety that had risen to so high a pitch, because, in case of the longer continuance of this state of things, our own annihilation might ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)

... all removed to a future world but one or two, they, one should think, would incline to follow. By all means let me be on your list of subscribers to Mr. Morrell's Prometheus. You have enlivened the town, I see, with a musical piece. The prologue is admirably fancied arripere populum tributim; though, to be sure, Foote's remark applies to it, that your prologues {329} have a culinary turn, and that therefore the motto to your collection of them should be, Animus jamdudum in Patinis. A player upon words might answer him, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various

... fault nor our custom; we protest against it. But, pray remember, I accuse nobody; for as I would not make a " watery discourse," so I would not put too much vinegar into it; nor would I raise the reputation of my own art, by the diminution or ruin of another's. And so much for the prologue to what I ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... comedies and take the direction of a theatre, it was no derogation to the dignity of the Staffordshire squire's grandson to do as much. Accordingly, in the following year he brought out a better comedy, 'The Double Dealer,' with a prologue which was spoken by the famous Anne Bracegirdle. She must have been eighty years old when Horace Walpole wrote of her to that other Horace—Mann: 'Tell Mr. Chute that his friend Bracegirdle breakfasted with me this morning. As she ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... encounter on this occasion. Thomas Shadwell, a man of some talents for comedy, and who professed to tread in the footsteps of Ben Jonson, had for some time been at variance with Dryden and Otway. He was probably the author of a poem, entitled, "A Lenten Prologue, refused by the Players;" which is marked by Mr Luttrel, 11th April, 1683, and contains the following direct attack on "The Duke of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... says the prologue to this play, which is said to be founded on a known true story, and exhibits various witchcrafts practised upon the neighbourhood by one Mother Sawyer, whose portrait with that of her familiar (a dog, called Tom, which is one of the dramatis personae,) is in the title-page. In ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various

... the language of fairies. He tells her that fairies are not small things, but quite the reverse. After a few sentences have been spoken the prologue comes to an end, and the curtain rises upon the scene of the play, the drawing-room of the Duke. Here is seated the Rev. Cyril Smith, a young clergyman, "an honest man and not an ass." To him enters the Duke's Secretary, to tell him the Duke is engaged at the ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... annexed as a State instead of being admitted as a State formed from territory belonging to the United States, for the very purpose of committing the nation to that theory. Its annexation was the prologue, as the Mexican war was the first act in the secession drama, and as the epilogue is the suppression of the rebellion on Texan soil. Texas is an exceptional case, and forms no precedent, and cannot be adduced as invalidating the general rule. Omitting Texas, the simple fact ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said this, but, since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... malediction fell, it was reserved for the dark destinies shadowed forth in the dread anathema he had uttered: to the development of which the tragic drama about to follow is devoted, and to which the fate of Abbot Paslew forms a necessary and fitting prologue. Thus far the veil of the Future may be drawn aside. That infant and her progeny became the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... heard of the fight at Gettysburg, he would feel certain that the words were written a few days after that great battle, even if there were no date anywhere in the manuscript. In the same way, when the Prologue of Shakespeare's Henry V alludes to the fact that Elizabeth's general (the Earl of Essex) is in Ireland quelling a rebellion, we know that this was written between April and September of 1599, the period during ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his "Saviour."... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity.... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... that day on the hills, and much has befallen; but the prologue is the kernel of my play, and the curtain which rose after that hour revealed things less worthy of chronicle. Why should I tell of how my trade prospered mightily, and of the great house we built at ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... Divine, the sole possessor of Divine sonship, and only through him are others put in the way of attaining to the same privilege. "But as many as received him," says the Alexandrian rhapsodist who wrote the prologue to the fourth gospel, "he gave them the power or the faculty to be made the sons of God, as many as ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... interested in is a real ordinance of fate or only a seeming one—because interest in a subject makes us observant. Am reading Greek with Julia. We began the sixth book of the Iliad. Tuesday.—Fifty lines in Homer; Companion proofs; Schleiermacher; the prologue and first scene of Terence's comedy of Andria; two Nos. of N. Nickleby, and walked round the Common with Julia twice. Wednesday.—Studies the same as yesterday, except that I read less of Schleiermacher and spent ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... of his very unique understanding into the following observation, which possesses a really deep meaning. It shows that he had an intuitive knowledge of the entire necessity with which, characters and motives being given, all actions take place. He makes it at the beginning of the prologue to his comedy Clitia. If, he says, the same men were to recur in the world in the way that the same circumstances recur, a hundred years would never elapse without our finding ourselves together once ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... and Romulus and Hersilia; or, The Sabine War, an anonymous tragedy. There were also notable revivals of Randolph's The Jealous Lovers, and Fletcher's The Maid in the Mill. The two Companies amalgamated in the autumn, opening at the Theatre Royal, 16 November, for which occasion a special Prologue and Epilogue were written by Dryden. 4 December, Dryden and Lee's famous tragedy, The Duke of Guise, had a triumphant first night. It will be remembered that Mrs. Behn is writing of incidents which took place on ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn

... Villain Still Pursued Her" is an excellent illustration of this point. When this very funny travesty was first produced, it did not have a prologue. It began almost precisely as the full-stage scene begins now, and the audience did not know whether to take it seriously or not. The instant he watched the audience at the first performance, the author sensed the problem he had to face. He ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... And what it is, I've shown: who wrote it too, And whose in Greek it is, were I not sure Most of you knew already, would I tell. But, wherefore I have ta'en this part upon me, In brief I will deliver: for the Bard Has sent me here as pleader, not as Prologue; You he declares his judges, me his counsel: And yet as counsel nothing can I speak More than the Author teaches me to say, Who wrote th' oration which I now recite. As to reports, which envious men have spread, That he ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer

... 'The prologue of a tale should always be mysterious. It is only the epilogue that must needs be clear. The story may be between the two. The matter of all three is very simple, because it concerns you and me. To be plain, Fraulein, I have come to justify myself in your eyes, to make an apology, a declaration ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... striving from lower spheres of life to higher ones, from the sensuous to the spiritual, from enjoyment to work, from creed to deed, from self to humanity—this is the moving thought of Goethe's completed Faust. The keynote is struck in the "Prologue in Heaven." Faust, so we hear, the daring idealist, the servant of God, is to be tempted by Mephisto, the despiser of reason, the materialistic scoffer. But we also hear, and we hear it from God's own lips, that the tempter ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... also mentions a man having recourse to one when his son was seriously ill.[61] The poets have, of course, made free use of this supposed prophetic power of the dead. The shade of Polydorus, for instance, speaks the prologue of the Hecuba, while the appearance of the dead Creusa in the AEneid is known to everyone. In the Persae, AEschylus makes the shade of Darius ignorant of all that has happened since his death, and is ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley

... night this winter, the Abbe Servien, not liking certain praises of the King contained in a Prologue, let slip a bitter joke in ridicule of them. The pit took it up, repeated it, and applauded it. Two days afterwards, the Abbe Servien was arrested and taken to Vincennes, forbidden to speak to anybody and allowed no servant ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... On another Window Apollo to the Dean News from Parnassus Apollo's Edict The Description of an Irish Feast The Progress of Beauty The Progress of Marriage The Progress of Poetry The South Sea Project Fabula Canis et Umbrae A Prologue Epilogue Prologue Epilogue Answer to Prologue and Epilogue On Gaulstown House The Country Life Dr. Delany's Villa On one of the Windows at Delville Carberiae Rupes Carbery Rocks Copy of the Birthday Verses on Mr. Ford On Dreams ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... up his plan of the Nibelung Trilogy, that is the three operas and a prologue. Early in 1853 the poem in its new form was complete, and in February he sent a copy to Liszt, who answered: "You are truly a wonderful man, and your Nibelung poem is surely the most incredible thing ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... the (ranch) library, which is furnished with mounted elk heads (didn't the Elks have a fish fry in Amagensett once?), and the denouement begins. I know of no more interesting time in the run of a play unless it be when the prologue ends. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... throughout with legends relating to the Devil, and with superstitious beliefs of the Middle Age. It is not always easy to determine when the poet is serious in his statement of religious belief, occasionally he appears to be so, and then a line or so shows us that he has a legend in mind. In the prologue of ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... equipoise of dulness may easily render dulness eternal. A developed mythology shows that man has taken a deep and active interest both in the world and in himself, and has tried to link the two, and interpret the one by the other. Myth is therefore a natural prologue to philosophy, since the love of ideas is the root of both. Both are made up of things ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... ticked off the time, until suddenly the heavens were racked by the prologue of the guns. Child's play that baptism of shell fire in the first charge of the war beside later thunders; and these, in turn, mild beside this terrific outburst, with all the artillery concentrated to support the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... it is merely by discomfort, and not by the pain and hideous sorrow of the world surrounding him, that he is affected. He is like Satan in the Book of Job, except that he is offering his victim luxuries instead of pains. In the prologue in Heaven he speaks with such a jaunty air that Professor Blackie's translation has omitted the passage as irreverent. He is the spirit that denies—sceptical and cynical, the anti-Christian that is in us all. His business is ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... passage Tyrwhit makes the following judicious comment: The school of Oxford seems to have been in much the same estimation for its dancing as that of Stratford for its French—alluding of course to what is, said in the Prologue of the French spoken by ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... lion, and says there is no one like him in the world; in the next stage, he is like an ape, and dances, jests, and talks nonsense, knowing not what he is doing and saying; when thoroughly drunken, he wallows in the mire like a sow.[63] To this legend Chaucer evidently alludes in the Prologue ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... Johnson resolutely looks facts in the face, and calls ugly things by their right names. Men, he tells us over and over again, are wretched, and there is no use in denying it. This doctrine appears in his familiar talk, and even in the papers which he meant to be light reading. He begins the prologue to a comedy with ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... the great romance was to go on that brave shelf of the unwritten books, the shelf where all the splendid books are to be found in their golden bindings. "The White People" is a small piece of salvage from the wreck. Oddly enough, as is insinuated in the Prologue, the mainspring of the story is to be sought in a medical textbook. In the Prologue reference is made to a review article by Dr. Coryn. But I have since found out that Dr. Coryn was merely quoting from a scientific treatise that case of the lady whose fingers became violently ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen

... purposely deferred mention of this subject, to the time when it was to fall upon us in its full force so that no one could ignore it or avoid action with regard to it. But I now reach the beginning of the drama which is the matter of this history, and to which all I have written is uneventful prologue. We young people of the Faringfield house (for I was still as much of that house as of my own) had concerned ourselves little with the news from London and Boston, of the concentration of British troops in the latter ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... came first as an advance-guard of the great Teuton invasion. It was but the prologue to the play when Hengist and Horsa, in 449 A.D., occupied what is now Kent, in the Southeast extremity of England. It was only when Cerdic and his Saxons placed foot on British soil(495 A.D.) that the real drama ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... ancient and modern prefaces of the several codes, in the fourth volume of the Historians of France. The original prologue to the Salic law expresses (though in a foreign dialect) the genuine spirit of the Franks more forcibly than the ten books of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... parted; by the Tree Of Knowledge he must pass, there he her met, Scarse from the Tree returning; in her hand 850 A bough of fairest fruit that downie smil'd, New gatherd, and ambrosial smell diffus'd. To him she hasted, in her face excuse Came Prologue, and Apologie to prompt, Which with bland words at will she thus addrest. Hast thou not wonderd, Adam, at my stay? Thee I have misst, and thought it long, depriv'd Thy presence, agonie of love till now Not felt, nor shall be twice, for never more Mean I to trie, what rash ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... while his valet, who stands behind him, adjusts the curls after the comb has passed through them." Allusions to this practice may be found in the plays from the reign of Charles II. down to the days of Queen Anne. We read in Dryden's prologue to "Almanzor and Almahide":— ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews

... openly and unchecked. Many English writers refer to this extraordinary desecration of a consecrated building, and from them we learn that the trading carried on in Paul's Walk included simony and chaffering for benefices. Chaucer, in the prologue to his Canterbury Tales, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... For here was a Lord Giovanni I seemed never to have known, and I was eager to behold the sequel to so fine a prologue. ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini

... Bears," and other pictures, are not less highly esteemed by English than by French connoisseurs. Born about 1820, she is twenty years younger than her husband, whom, in 1845, she accompanied in his excursion to Spitzbergen; an excursion which opened with, by way of prologue, a rapid tour through Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and Norway. Of the tour and the excursion she has published a brilliant narrative, which it is impossible to read without pleasure, so polished is the style, and so sharply defined are the descriptions. Her literary skill gives her an advantage over ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... to the end of the last verse but one, it is a dialogue between an earl's son and a baron's daughter, in alternate stanzas; a prologue and an epilogue ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick

... popular tradition in the first scene of the last act of Fletcher's The Noble Gentleman. So, too, in the Prologue to Beaumont and Fletcher's, or Fletcher and Massinger's, The False One, a tragedy dealing with ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare

... opposed to me. I felt myself wounded, excited by many coincident annoyances there. I felt uncomfortable in my native country, yes, almost ill. I therefore left my piece to its fate, and, suffering and disconcerted, I hastened forth. In this mood I wrote a prologue to The Moorish Maiden; which betrayed my irritated mind far too palpably. If I would represent this portion of my life more clearly and reflectively it would require me to penetrate into the mysteries of the theatre, to analyze our aesthetic cliques, and to drag into conspicuous notice many individuals, ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen

... to take place of great and enduring moment, a kind of prologue, on a small scale, sometimes anticipates the true opening of the drama; like the first drops which give notice of the coming storm, or as if the shadows of the reality were projected forwards into ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... that Davenant was taken as the original hero of that burlesque masterpiece, The Rehearsal (1671); and even when the part of Bayes was transferred to Dryden, the make-up still remained largely that of Davenant.] In a well-known prologue he describes his ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... has been but seldom performed. It was acted in London in 1856. In February 1878 Mr. Phelps gave it extremely well in the Annexe Theatre at the Westminster Aquarium. Lastly, William Farren, as Archer, revived it at the Imperial Theatre, on Monday, 22nd September 1879, with great success, a new Prologue (spoken by Mrs. Stirling) being written for the occasion. There were several matinees given in succession. The cast included Mr. Kyrle Bellew as Gibbet; Mr. Lionel Brough as Scrub; Miss Marie Litton as Mrs. Sullen; ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar

... of the language of the book of Marco Polo's travels was Marco's, and how much was the worthy Rusticiano's, we are unable to decide. The facts in that famous book were duly vouched for by Marco. The opening chapter, or prologue, inflated and wordy, after the fashion of the times, was undoubtedly Rusticiano's. He began thus: "Great Princes, Emperors, and Kings, Dukes and Marquises, Counts, Knights, and Burgesses! and People ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... and Fletcher, Webster, Massinger, and Ford, we should have a gross caricature of our own follies and our own vices. Nay, so essential is foulness to the modern stage that when the manager ventures a serious play, he takes care to introduce it with some filthy prologue, and to spice the finish ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... half second longer than he usually would—I thought, his timing's off tonight—and then he harrumphed and said, "Why, Iris Nefer, decked out as Good Queen Bess, will speak a prologue to the play—a prologue which I have myself but last week writ." He owled his eyes. "'Tis an experiment ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... and was gone. There was never a more absolute surprise. She came, she took, she vanished, we had not a guess whither; and we remained, with foolish looks and laughter on the empty field. Such was the fit prologue of our memorable bargaining. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... lived through that prologue in the Ghetto garret, when, as benevolent master-tailor receiving the highest class work from S. Cohn's in the Holloway Road, he was called upstairs to assist the penniless ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... alterations, and lazily kept it some months, then took courage and furbished it up in a day or two and took it. In less than a fortnight I heard the principal part was given to Elliston, who liked it, and only wanted a prologue, which I have since done and sent; and I had a note the day before yesterday from the manager, Wroughton (bless his fat face, he is not a bad actor in some things), to say that I should be summoned to the rehearsal after the next, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... Jove may, &c.] i.e. And may Jove, &c. This collocation of words is sometimes found in later writers: so in the Prologue to Fletcher's ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe

... it is complete in itself, is also the first of a trilogy, the scope of which is suggested in the prologue. The story of scientific discovery has its own epic unity—a unity of purpose and endeavour—the single torch passing from hand to hand through the centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour, the pioneers saw their accumulated facts ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... Perry, Perrysburg, Ohio, and made available through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library <http://www.ccel.org>. I have eliminated unnecessary formatting in the text, corrected some errors in transcription, and added the dedication, tables of contents, Prologue, and the numbers of the questions and articles, as they appeared in the printed translation published by Benziger Brothers. Each article is now designated by part, question number, and article ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... who is supposed to have been a student of the Middle Temple, and who is said to have once beaten an insolent Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, gives a eulogistic sketch of a Temple manciple, or purveyor of provisions, in the prologue to his wonderful ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... government and regulation of the monastic and military society of the Temple, is principally of a religious character and of an austere and gloomy cast. It is divided into seventy-two heads or chapters, and is preceded by a short prologue addressed "to all who disdain to follow after their own wills, and desire with purity of mind to fight for the most high and true King," exhorting them to put on the armor of obedience, and to associate themselves together with piety and humility for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... be said to begin here; his earlier work furnishing the Prologue. On the 25th September, 1519, when he was about two-and-twenty, he joined the Basel Guild of Painters; that same "Guild of Heaven" (Zunft zum Himmel) which his brother Ambrose had joined two years earlier and from which he seems to have passed to the veritable guild ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue

... taken by boys. No women appeared on the stage until the reign of Charles II. The Play began with the Prologue, spoken by an actor dressed in a long black velvet coat bowing very humbly to the audience. After the Play was over the clowns began to tumble and to sing. In short, a farce succeeded a tragedy. The time ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... compliment to Lady Margaret, King Edward's daughter, Countess of Pembroke, one of his patronesses. But Warton hesitates to express a decided opinion as to the reference. Chaucer shows his love for the daisy in other places. In his "Prologue to the Legend of Good Women," alluding to the power with which the flowers drive him from his ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various

... amused at the prologue, and waited on the tale. It soon came. Oliphant, it appeared, was the purse-bearer of the household, and woeful straits that poor purse-bearer must have been often put to. I questioned him as to his master's revenues, but could get no clear ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... thanked me warmly, and said he would adopt all my suggestions. He wrote a new prologue, in which he made the protection of his mother's good name the motive of the hero's silence, and he omitted both the things I ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... Miracles consisted of short dramatic representations of many single passages of the sacred story. The whole would occupy about three days. It began with the Creation, and ended with the Judgment. That for which the city of Coventry was famous consists of forty-two subjects, with a long prologue. Composed by ecclesiastics, the plays would seem to have been first represented by them only, although afterwards it was not always considered right for the clergy to be concerned with them. The hypocritical Franciscan friar, in "Piers Ploughman's Creed," a poem of the close of ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... correspondent of his, and he told me a good deal about you. I was not quite sure when you first came that you were the same man. I was very glad when I found that you were. Only I don't forget that you have not had the like prologue about me." ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... telegraphed the news of the composer's death to a friend in England. He stated that Scriabin died of the disease of the lip from which he was suffering when in England last year, and that he had just finished the "wonderful poetical text" of the prologue to his "Mystery." When Scriabin was suffering terrible pain just before his death he clenched his hands and his last words were: "I ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... smouldering in men's hearts, till the hollow settlement of 1815 is burst asunder anew, and men feel that they are no longer in the beginning of the end, but in the end itself, and that this long thirty years' prologue to the reconstruction of rotten Europe is played out at last, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... the militia furnished from these sources, the service of a small number of mercenaries, who formed a body-guard, called the Foot-Band. The satirical poet, Sir David Lindsay (or the person who wrote the prologue to his play of the Three Estaites), has introduced Finlay of the Foot-Band, who after much swaggering upon the stage is at length put to flight by the Fool, who terrifies him by means of a sheep's skull upon a pole. I have ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... Art, so gratified the mob, that for half a century their exhibition was called for on the night of November the fifth. Rowe, moreover, belonged to the straitest sect of Whiggery,—was so bigoted, indeed, as to decline the acquaintance of a Tory, and in play and prologue missed no chance of testifying devotion to liberal opinions.[5] His investiture with the laurel was only another proof that at moments of revolution extremists first rise to the surface. A man of affluent fortune, and the recipient of redundant favors from the new ministry, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... enemy Mr. Kruger, who was pulling the strings at the other end, is still alive. Perhaps the old man may be spared to see the end of the bloody drama; it was undoubtedly he and Mr. Rhodes who played the leading parts in the prologue. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... that Phosilampes may be a mystery name of Basilides. Has a commentary on the Gospel of St John been used here, or a commentary on the prologue by Basilides [containing perhaps the teachings of the alleged instructor of Basilides, Glaucias, whose name, rather suggesting the "shining one," may equal "Phosilampes"], which interpreted "In the beginning" as meaning ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh

... Wagner has been faulted is that in his treatment of the Siegfried legend he has sacrificed historical elements in order to bring it into closer relationship with Norse mythology; has, in fact, made the fate of the gods and goddesses of our ancestors the chief concern of the prologue and succeeding dramas. Except for those who prefer to see only ethical symbols in the characters there is some force in the objection. Like Homer in his "Iliad," Wagner has a celestial as well as a terrestrial ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... 24. Arthur Foote's symphonic prologue "Francesca da Rimini" produced by the Boston ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee

... best known to himself, appeared to be acting with a view toward partial conciliation. The Chevalier did not wholly ignore this advance. D'Herouville would fight fair as became a gentleman, and that was enough. Since they were soon to set about killing each other, what mattered the prologue? ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... corkscrew was disregarded as a useless implement, and whisky-bottles were decapitated against the tent poles. I remember vaguely the crowning episode of the evening when the little major was dancing the Irish jig with a kitchen chair; when Falstaff was singing the Prologue of Pagliacci to the stupefied colonel; when the boy, once of Barts', was roaring like a lion under the mess table, and when the tall, melancholy surgeon was at the top of the tent pole, scratching himself like a gorilla in his native haunts... Outside, the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... 1922), edited by Rev. T.N. Taylor. All the translated writings and sayings of St. Therese contained in that book are in this electronic edition, including the autobiography as well as "Counsels and Reminiscences," letters, and selected poems. Also included are the preface by Cardinal Bourne, the prologue relating Therese's parentage and birth, and the epilogue describing her final illness, her death, and related events. Not included are the illustrations, the list of illustrations, accounts of favors attributed to the intercession ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)

... countenanced by the patronage, and in some degree the example of Lorenzo himself, otherwise a friend to true learning, as a sign that the glorious hopes of this century are to be quenched in gloom; nay, that they have been the delusive prologue to an age worse than that of iron—the age of tinsel and gossamer, in which no thought has substance enough to be moulded ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... Tub, and his Miscellanies—among which his best metrical satires appeared; all Defoe's work, too, as well as Steele's in the Tatler, and Addison's in the Spectator, Arbuthnot's History of John Bull, Churchill's Rosciad, and finally all Pope's poems, including the famous "Prologue" as well as the "Epilogue" to the Satires. It is curious to note how the satirical succession (if the phrase be permitted) is maintained uninterruptedly from Bishop Hall down to the death of Pope—nay, ...
— English Satires • Various



Words linked to "Prologue" :   dramatic work, prologize, introduction



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