"Lear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fill himself to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out. I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an excellent thing to take all the trouble, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... know that the Bible suffers by a comparison with Shakespeare. They know that there is nothing within the lids of what they call "the sacred book" that can for one moment stand side by side with "Lear" or "Hamlet" or "Julius Caesar" or "Antony and Cleopatra" or with any other play written by the immortal man. They know what a poor figure the Davids and the Abrahams and the Jeremiahs and the Lots, the Jonahs, the Jobs and the Noahs cut when on the stage with ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the while the worldly-wise, to whom the tempest is only a matter of the machineries of a theatre—of painted clouds, electric lights, and sheets of copper—the world-wise govern the storm as they choose and leave you in it defenceless and lonely as old Lear. To put your heart into life is the most fatal of errors; it is to give a hostage to your enemies whom you can only ransom at the price of your ruin. But what is the use of talking? To you, life will be always Alastor and Epipsychidion, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... prey to anxiety and remorse. I could not eat; dinner was removed with unlifted covers. I went out. The world seemed to have acquired a new face; nothing was to be seen but raisins and rounds of beef. I wandered about like Lear—I had given up all! I felt myself grated against the world like a nutmeg. It grew dark—I sustained a still gloomier shock. Every chance seemed to have expired, and everybody seemed to have a delightful engagement ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... rabbits were embalmed in spices, cocks' combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a Lear. A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish of oyster-loaves and a ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Consort of Vocal and Instrumental Musick, for the Benefit of Mr. Edward Keen, the Father of twenty Children; and that this Day the haughty George Powell hopes all the good-natur'd part of the Town will favour him, whom they Applauded in Alexander, Timon, Lear, and Orestes, with their Company this Night, when he hazards all his heroick Glory for their Approbation in the humbler Condition of honest ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... mighty 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 reverberated from the solid ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... were recorded in the newspapers. His letter to his son-in-law, expressing the warmest affection for all his family except his son, is sufficient to prevent the horrible notion that he might have been driven forth like Lear by his undutiful children after he had parted his goods among them. If they had been capable of such unnatural conduct, they would not have failed to secure his remaining property. Why, then, were his goods and chattels ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... off the usurper, and deliver his poor captive countrymen at the edge of the sword, when suddenly his successful career was brought to an end in rather a mortifying way. Yusef, frightened out of his defiance, consented to come to terms with Colonel Lear, American Consul-General at Algiers. If Colonel Lear had not been too hasty in concluding a treaty which forced the United States to pay sixty thousand dollars ransom money, when not a cent should have been given, and left the cruel Yusef safe on his throne, ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress, money with which she could learn to read "Othello" and "King Lear" in the original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... the "Jealous Wife." Mr. Inchbald was thirty-seven years old, and had sons by a former marriage. In September, 1772, Mrs. Inchbald tried her fortune on the stage by playing Cordelia to her husband's Lear. Beauty alone could not assure success. The impediment in speech made it impossible for Mrs. Inchbald to succeed greatly as an actress. She was unable to realise her own conceptions. At times she and her husband prospered so little that on one day ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... King Lear were a true one; and that a modern historian were giving the abstract of it in a school manual, purporting to contain all essential facts in British history valuable to British youth in competitive examination. The story would be related somewhat ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... various dialects in the South of India, as a matter of convenience the English language is much used for personal communication by the natives of different parts of the Presidency of Madras. Mr. Edward Lear, who has travelled much in that part of the country, gives the following interesting account of a journey:—"I was in a second-class railway carriage going from Madras to Bangalore. There was only one other passenger beside myself and servant, and he was a Brahmin, ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... venture and struck a vein of reminiscence of a very 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 ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... nature, and therefore the feelings of a more polished generation immediately sympathize with them. We need no numerous notes, no antiquarian dissertations, to enable the most ignorant to recognize the sentiments and diction of the characters of Homer; we have but, as Lear says, to strip off our lendings—to set aside the factitious principles and adornments which we have received from our comparatively artificial system of society, and our natural feelings are in unison with those of the bard of Chios and ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... ground floor made boxes, the pavement of the court the pit, and the balcony the gallery. The Green Box, reared against the wall, was thus in front of a theatre. It was very like the Globe, where they played "Othello," "King Lear," ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... old trade of 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 ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... primordial instincts of the crowd. It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear. The crowd is more partisan than the individual; and therefore, in following this struggle of the drama, it desires always to take sides. There is no fun in seeing a foot-ball game unless you care about who wins; and there is very ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... effort has resolved itself into a begging of the question. Shakespeare made Hamlet comprehensible to the groundlings by diluting that half of him which was Shakespeare with a half which was a college sophomore. In the same way he saved Lear by making him, in large part, a tedious and obscene old donkey—the blood brother of any average ancient of any average English tap-room. Tackling Caesar, he was rescued by Brutus' knife. George Bernard Shaw, facing the same difficulty, resolved it by drawing a composite portrait of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... here. For hordes of brutal soldiery had invaded the fertile soil, the tempest of war had swept the land and left it desolate. The South lay battered and bruised, and pros trate in blood, the "Niobe of nations," as sad a victim of ingratitude as King Lear. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... on English ground now; of course, it is wet weather. The phenomena of the British climate have not changed much since the time when the rains "let fall their horrible pleasure" upon the head of the poor, drenched outcast, Lear. Thunder and lightning, however, which belonged to that particular war of the elements, are rare in England. The rain is quiet, fine, insinuating, constant as a lover,—not wasting its resources in sudden, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... 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 of hate and scorn, as their own natures sink ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... role by noting that the scoring throughout tends to glutinousness, like that of the pre-war Carlsbad plum; further, that a solo on the muted viola against an accompaniment of sixteen sarrusophones is only effective if the sarrusophones are prepared to roar like sucking-doves, which, as LEAR would have said, "they seldom if ever do." Still, on the whole the Variations ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... current during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which is given by Reginald Scot. The narrative is edifying as peculiarly illustrative of the mode of marring a curious tale in telling it, which was one of the virtues professed by Caius when he hired himself to King Lear. Reginald Scot, incredulous on the subject of witchcraft, seems to have given some weight to the belief of those who thought that the spirits of famous men do, after death, take up some particular habitations near cities, towns, and countries, and act as tutelary and guardian ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... in the august presence of my mother and my regent aunt, but if my small cousin, the Most Christian King, should enter, I must be dethroned, and a succession of bows must ensue before we can either of us be seated. I always fear that I shall some day break out with the speech of King Lear's fool: 'Cry you mercy, I took ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ye broken men?" Quo' fause Sakelde; "come tell to me!" Now Dickie of Dryhope led that band, And the never a word o' lear had he. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... daughters are said to have robbed him of his books, besides cheating and plaguing him in the economy of his house, etc., etc. His feelings on such an outrage, both as a parent and a scholar, must have been singularly painful. Hayley compares him to Lear. See part third, Life of Milton, by W. Hayley (or Hailey, as spelt in the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... madness would seem to pass into real madness in Ophelia. King Lear's growing perturbation becomes insanity the moment he sees the pretended ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... those Dumb Beasts in our own degree! fondling them indeed when they are Kittens and Puppies, but fighting Tooth and Nail with them when they be full grown. But there is as much to be said on the one side as on the other; and for every poor old Lear wandering up and down, pursued by the spite of Goneril and Regan, shall you find a Cordelia whose heart is ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... out 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 ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... 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 ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... heroic type. Coriolanus—Caesar—Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;—Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... are now within a foot Of the extreme verge; for all beneath the moon Would I not leap upright! KING LEAR. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... preferred a claim to the praise of invention, by not concealing that his supplementary labours were considerable! how selfish his conduct, contrasted with that of the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance!—Open this far-famed Book!—I have done so at random, and the beginning of the Epic Poem Temora, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... for. It has never asked the gold nor the plaudits of the multitude. Job, and Hamlet, and Faust, and Lear, were never written to fill the pages of a Sunday newspaper. John Milton and John Bunyan were not publishers' hacks; nor were John Hampden, John Bright, or Samuel Adams under ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... dinner of the Garrick Club.... After tea I read Daru, and copied fair a speech I had been writing for an imaginary member of the House of Peers, on the Reform Bill. John Mason called, and they sat down to a rubber, and I came to my own room and read "King Lear." ... ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... or a fishing-rod. Forbye, I would rather walk ae mile on the hill wi' ye than twae, for ye gang up a brae-face like a mawkin! God! There's no a single man's trade that ye're no brawly fitted for. And then ye've a heap o' book-lear that folk learned ye away about England, though I cannot speak muckle on that, no being ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... the Great, Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims, who was himself present in the scenes that he describes. It was—like Geoffrey of Monmouth's nearly contemporary "History of British Kings," from which were drawn tales of Gorboduc, Lear and King Arthur—romance itself, and the source of romance in others. It is at the root of many tales of Charlemagne and Roland that reached afterwards their highest artistic expression in Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." The tale ascribed to Turpin is of earlier date than the year ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... sometimes uses iche as a dissyllable; vide his Poems passim. Ch'am, is I am, that is, ich am; ch'ill, is I will, ich will. See Shakespeare's King Lear, Act IV., Scene IV. What is very remarkable, and which confirms me greatly in the opinion which I here state, upon examining the first folio edition of Shakespeare, at the London Institution, I find that ch is printed, in one instance, with a mark of elision before ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... Van de Lear's son, Calvin. He's going to succeed his venerable and pious poppy in Kensington pulpit. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... insensible across his arms, her fair head hanging back, her white garments streaming in the air, her golden locks floating, her witching eyes closed, and her blue lips apart and rigid on her glistening teeth—so she lay like dead Cordelia in the arms of old Lear. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... corners with her eyes cast down; flushed whenever she was addressed; stammered whenever she answered a question, and nearly died of heart failure when subjected to an examination of any sort. She delighted the committee when reading at sight from "King Lear," but somewhat discouraged them when she could not tell the capital of the United States. She admitted that her former teacher, Miss Dearborn, might have mentioned it, but if so she had ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... began to appear, JEAN-FRANCOIS DUCIS (1733-1816), the patron of whose imagination was his "Saint Guillaume" of Stratford, though he knew no English, had in a fashion presented Hamlet (1769) and Romeo and Juliet to his countrymen; King Lear, Macbeth, King John, Othello (1792) followed. But Ducis came a generation too soon for a true Shakespearian rendering; simple and heroic in his character as a man, he belonged to an age of philosophers and sentimentalists, an age of "virtue" and "nature." Shakespeare's ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... her life; she cared little what happened to her. And it is just such moods that transform and elevate what otherwise would be absurd to the nobly serious; that changes the impossible into the possible; just as an exalted mood or mind is, or was, the primary difference between Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Lear, and any of the forgotten Bowery melodramas ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... 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 ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... exception to this rule, which, however, admirably illustrates the fundamental principle of it, is where by the diversity of evils represented the mind is relieved from painful absorption in any of them. There is a scene in King Lear, where the horror of the storm is made to brood over at least four miseries, that of the king, of the fool, of Edgar in his real person, and of Edgar in his assumed character. The vividness of each of these portrayals, with its different ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... himself; and it stands to the present day, without anything in it having been altered since. The king was five days there, and summoned by message-token the people to a Thing, both for the districts of Vagar, Lear, and Hedal; and gave out the message along with the token, that they must either receive Christianity and give their sons as hostages, or see their habitations burnt. They came before the king, and submitted to his pleasure; but some fled ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... their holiday together in the large, luxurious living room. Only one evening found them away from this temporary home. That was on Thanksgiving night, when Miriam gave a theatre party in honor of her guests to see Everett Southard and Anne in "King Lear," and after the play Mr. and Miss Southard entertained their friends at supper in one of New York's most exclusive restaurants. Thanksgiving morning they spent in the church of which Eric Burroughs the actor-minister was pastor, and in the afternoon they ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... Lear were roles in which he [Burbage] gained especial renown. But Burbage and Shakespeare were popularly credited with co-operation in less solemn enterprises. They were reputed to be companions in many sportive adventures. The sole anecdote ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... Lear. Meane time we shal expresse our darker purpose. Giue me the Map there. Know, that we haue diuided In three our Kingdome: and 'tis our fast intent, To shake all Cares and Businesse from our Age, Conferring them on yonger strengths, while we Vnburthen'd crawle ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... yourself. Worked off the police evidence and the doctor, d'you see? Then—'Mr. Bright!' Old man comes up into the box. Stands there massive, bowed with grief, chest heaving, voice coming out of it like an organ in the Dead March. Stands there like Lear over the body of Cordelia. Stands there like the father of Virginia ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... 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; ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... phrases—as when he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and is usually nothing but a delicate dissimulation to attract the confidence of others"—that the more timid of his auditors shrank from him, as if he had been Hamlet or Lear. When he dared to suggest that none of these maxims were intended to refer to the reader himself, but only to all other persons, he invited the reaction which led Huet, Bishop of Avranches, to appeal against the morality of the "Maximes," ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Priam's family and refugee from Troy,—but go on to give the history of other early kings of Britain, including Arthur. They often touch the true epic note,—as in the wrestling match between Corineus and the giant,—use similes drawn from every-day life, and supply us with legends of King Lear and ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... over it almost to her knees. What did the flower say? Is it to 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 truth ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Bacon's Essays. I dare say I couldn't light upon all these now; but, having been turning over Essai 9, Lib. III. De la Vanite, I find one sentence which comes to the point: 'Car parfois c'est bien choisir de ne choisir pas.' In the same Essay is a piece of King Lear, perhaps; 'De ce mesme papier ou il vient d'escrire l'arrest de condemnation contre un Adultere, le Juge en desrobe un lopin pour en faire un poulet a la femme de son compaignon.' One doesn't talk of such things as of ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... little of his thought, running as an undercurrent to his nature. Clara had been singing with such sweetness of expression and pathetic emphasis, that my eyes were filled with tears of emotion. Miss Lear, a young lady friend, followed her, and sang with such a shrill voice, such unprecedented flying about among the octaves, that it shocked me through every nerve, and I trembled visibly and uttered an involuntary exclamation of impatience. ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... was brought by Thetis, whose mother's prayer had moved the Heart of Zeus, to dwell with Cadmus and Peleus, is Achilles' true home; or the isle of the heroes of all time, described by Carducci, where King Lear sits telling OEdipus of his sufferings, and Cordelia calls to Antigone, "Come, my Greek sister! We will sing of peace to our fathers." Helen and Iseult, silent and thoughtful, roam under the shade of the myrtles, while the setting sun kisses their golden ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... 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, ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... has been blamed by some few critical asses for the raillery of Mercutio, and the humor of the nurse, in "Romeo and Juliet;" for the fool in "Lear;" for the porter in "Macbeth;" the grave-diggers in "Hamlet," etc.; because, it is said, these bits interrupt the tragic feeling. No such thing; they enhance it to an incalculable extent; they deepen its degree, though they diminish its duration. And what is the result? that ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... power of wrath, inheriting the high, hasty temper of his mother. Tobias Lear, his intimate friend and private secretary, says that in the winter of 1791, an officer brought a letter telling of General St. Clair's disastrous defeat by the Indians. It must be delivered to the President himself. He left his family and guests ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... 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
... world in thin disguise much of his own life-story? Shakespeare alone, of men of genius of the first rank, seems to have learned comparatively few of his lessons in the school of suffering. But, possibly, if more were known of Shakespeare, it would be found that Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet are but the expressions of lessons learned ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... 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 shall ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... On December 7, 1834, at the third and last of a series of concerts given by Berlioz at the Conservatoire, Chopin played an "Andante" for the piano with orchestral accompaniments of his own composition, which, placed as it was among the overtures to "Les Francs-Juges" and "King Lear," the "Harold" Symphony, and other works of Berlioz, no doubt sounded at the concert as strange as it looks on the programme. The "Andante" played by Chopin was of course the middle movement of one of his concertos. [Footnote: ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Moor, The passionate love of Juliet; Thy villainous art can weave a net With shreds of song, that never yet Hath lover escaped, however noble and pure. Ophelia's broken heart is thine, And Desdemona's, true and good; Thou paintest the damn-ed spot of blood That will not out in stain or line! Oh Lear! Oh Fool! Oh Witch Macbeth! And wondrous Hamlet in a breath! Who knows thy heart? thy song? thy words? Thou Shakespeare in the ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... Lear, I pour'd forth the deep imprecation, By my daughters of kingdom and reason deprived; Till, fired by loud plaudits and self-adulation, I regarded myself ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... numbers, or both. Dynasties and aristocracies which have disregarded the laws of nature have decreased in numbers and degenerated in stature; 'mariages de convenance' leave their enfeebling stamp on the offspring of them (King Lear). The marriage of near relations, or the marrying in and in of the same family tends constantly to weakness or idiocy in the children, sometimes assuming the form as they grow older of passionate licentiousness. The common ...
— The Republic • Plato
... 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 they had generally ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... Shakespere's plays?... We had ever so much about Shakespere. Weren't you perfectly astonished when you found out how many other plays there were of his? I always thought there was nothing but "Hamlet," and "Romeo and Juliet," and "Macbeth," and "Richard III.," and "King Lear," and that one that Robson and Crane ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... drawn up to his fullest height, imposing as a new King Lear, his deep, dark eyes ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... 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 Rubens or Gilbert Stuart would gloat over in portraiture, and love ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... give a melody (copied from or at any rate resembling the Gregorian chant or the sequences of Notker of Tubilo), the other voices would sing songs in the vernacular, and, strangest of all, one voice would repeat some Latin word, or even a "nonsense word" (to use Edward Lear's term) but much more slowly than the other voices. Thus the needs of the Mystery were as well met by incipient counterpoint on the one hand, as, on the other, the secular song-play engendered ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... 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 ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... in general society, and was difficult of access in his home, except to his intimate friends, yet those friends were among the elect spirits of England, and he has recorded his feeling for some of them—for Maurice, Fitzgerald, Spedding, Lear, among others—in poems that deserve a place among his best. His friendship for Carlyle grew out of his admiration for the genius of the man as well as his character, and Carlyle has left more than one sketch of his friend among his inimitable word-portraits ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... hand he was holding, and his face as he looked at her was inscrutable. Into his mind there had flashed Lear's question: "And goes thy heart with this?" Then irritably he banished it. . . . God bless her! She was all heart: ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... backward-sloping tall letters with which I had aimed at giving it an air of distinction had already been compared by one of my teachers to Persian hieroglyphics. In this composition I had constructed a drama in which I had drawn largely upon Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and Goethe's Gotz van Berlichingen. The plot was really based on a modification of Hamlet, the difference consisting in the fact that my hero is so completely carried away by the appearance of the ghost of his father, who has been murdered under ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... West. Your second landscape 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 the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... 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 hear some ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... comforted, good madam; the great rage, You see is cured in him: and yet it is danger To make him even o'er the time he has lost. Desire him to go in: trouble him no more, Till further settling. KING LEAR. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... a printer by trade, an editor by profession, and a hunter by choice. When busily employed he usually puts his hat in his pocket, and his thin hair and long beard stream in the wind, giving him a wild look, much like that of King Lear in an illustrated copy of Shakespeare which tumbles ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... vanished, and poor Cos lamentably disgraced himself at Sir Charles Mirabel's table, by premature inebriation. A carriage was called for him: the hospitable door was shut upon him. Often and sadly did he speak to his friends at the Kitchen of his resemblance to King Lear in the plee—of his having a thankless choild, bedad—of his being a pore worn-out, lonely old man, dthriven to dthrinking by ingratitude, and seeking to dthrown his sorrows ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... last evening, the 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 which he put at rest as "FAR BEYOND OUR REACH," etc., etc. He ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... Pierian colonists, and the people distasteful. The clipped hair and penitential scowl of the men made heavy the hearts of the Muses; their daughters and wives had a sharp, harsh, pert "tang" in their speech, that grated upon the ears of Apollo, who held with King Lear as to the excellence of a low, soft voice in woman. Each native seemed to the strangers sadly alike in looks, dress, manners, and pursuits, to every other native. Of Art they were absolutely ignorant. They built their temples on the same model as their barns. Poetry meant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... 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 ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the fyngers. And as for Addition, Subtraction, Multiplicatio{n}, and Diuision (which yet were neuer taught by any man as farre as I do knowe) I wyll enstruct you after the treatyse of fractions. And now for this tyme fare well, and loke that you cease not to practyse that you haue lear ned. S. Syr, with moste harty mynde I thanke you, bothe for your good learnyng, {and} also your good cou{ns}el, which (god wyllyng) I truste ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... since thou needs woldst vnderstand my sham Which I did grieue and blush to ope to thee, And had lear di'd then told thee of the same, Now be not slacke to lend thy helpe to me, Thou forst me for to open my disgrace, Then lend thy help ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... went dark as 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
... the burden of the accompaniment gracefully); a pleasant "Reverie" for string orchestra, harp, and organ; and two impromptus for string orchestra, a "Meditation" representing Cordelia brooding tenderly over the slumbering King Lear,—art ministering very tenderly to the mood,—and a cleverly woven ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... other remains of this time are the death of Byrhtnoth, The Fight of Finsborough, and the Chronicle of King Lear and his Daughters, the last of which is the foundation of an old play, upon which Shakspeare's tragedy of Lear ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... was called, the Hannibal of the New World, who with three hundred untrained militia conquered for you that vast domain of the Northwest, which Virginia, in her devotion to the Union gave, a free donation with magnanimity surpassing that of Lear. She divided her possession with her associates, and let me add, it has not been requited with the ingratitude of Lear's daughters, for the disposition and the policy of this Government toward Virginia at the end of the war, and toward the people of the South has been ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... and we know it so well and feel so much with Caesar or with Lear or with Othello or with Macbeth, that we instinctively take it all for true psychology, while it after all covers just the exceptional ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... In the field-mouse, the daisy, the water-fowl, he beholds types and symbols. His own experience stands for all men's. The conscience-stricken Macbeth is a poet when he cries, "Life is a walking shadow," and King Lear makes the same pathetic generalization when he exclaims, "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?" Through the shifting phenomena of the present the poet feels the sweep of the universe; his mimic play and "the great globe itself" are alike an "insubstantial pageant," ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the succumbing of the spirit to the appalling facts with which it deals; even in those cases in which, as in the tragedy of "King Lear," blind fate seems relentlessly sovereign over human affairs, the artist must disclose in his attitude and method a sustained energy of spirit. Nothing shows so clearly a decline in creative force as a loss of interest on the part of the artist ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... final trial of a great case that had been before the court for many years, and the privileged seats were filled with the highest legal talent, sitting to hear him. It was a famous will case[26], and I remember that he was quoting from "King Lear" as ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... into the blue gulfs over him. No one can detect the first beginnings of any life, and those of spiritual emotion must more than any lie beyond our ken: there is infinite room for hope. Falconer said no more. We betook ourselves early within doors, and he read King Lear to us, expounding the spiritual history of the poor old king after a fashion I had never conceived—showing us how the said history was all compressed, as far as human eye could see of it, into the few months that elapsed ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... 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. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... practically considered. The plot is simple, the handling of it direct and skilful, there is no propaganda to interfere with the characters, who are few, interesting, and admirably drawn. The contrast between the lion of Albrit (so often compared to King Lear) and the playful children is a master-stroke. Free from effectism, dealing only with inner values of the heart and morals, El abuelo can properly rank as one of the masterpieces of modern drama. Its theme is diametrically opposed to the traditional Spanish conception of family honor ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... her cheek upon her hand, And prattles to the night. Anon, a reverend form With tattered robe and forehead bare, That challenge all the torments of the air, Goes by! And the pent feelings choke in one long sigh, While, as the mimic thunder rolls, you hear The noble wreck of Lear Reproach like things of life the ancient skies, And commune with the storm! Lo! next a dim and silent chamber, where Wrapt in glad dreams, in which, perchance, the Moor Tells his strange story o'er, The gentle Desdemona chastely lies, Unconscious of the loving ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... are only used now for cheap search-lights. 2. I will only mention some of the best. 3. I only had time to read "King Lear." 4. He only spoke to me, not to you. 5. Coons are only killed with the help of dogs. The coon only comes out in the night-time. 6. Lost, a Scotch terrier, by a gentleman, with his ears cut close. ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... perjured, and 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 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 them."[76] ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... his rhymed poems are his Sonnets, in which he chronicles many of the various moods of his mind. The plays consist of tragedies, historical plays, and comedies. The greatest of his tragedies are probably Hamlet and King Lear; the best of his historical plays, Richard III. and Julius Csar; and his finest comedies, Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It. He wrote in the reign of Elizabeth as well as in that of James; but his greatest works ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... worse rapidly, and early in the morning Dr. Craik was sent for. Washington said to Mr. Lear, his private secretary: ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... 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 |
