"Lear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and well know that J. K. is an eminent actor, and one whom we have not niggardly praised. Yet we will not disparage departed excellence for any person existing; and therefore cannot avoid wishing our young author had seen Garrick, and bearing in his "mind's eye" his natural acting of Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard, &c.—he might then go and witness the performances of Mr. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Angelo is that the observer feels his whole frame enlarged." It is creation, it is representing beings and things different from our nature, but true to their own. In this self-consistency is the only nature requisite in works purely imaginative. Lear is true to his nature, and so are Mephistopheles, and Prometheus, and Achilles; but they are not true to human nature; they are beings created by the poets' minds, and true to their laws of being. There is no commoner blunder in men, who are themselves mere critics, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Edward Lear, an English writer, began the popularization of the limerick in his nonsense books about 1850 and since his time it has been experimented with by many of the cleverest writers ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... these in date of composition, and in popular estimation at least among English readers, comes, 'Le Pere Goriot.' It is certainly trite to call the book a French "Lear," but the expression emphasizes the supreme artistic power that could treat the motif of one of Shakespeare's plays in a manner that never forces a disadvantageous comparison with the great tragedy. The retired vermicelli-maker ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... don't want them sent home. They are for a poor woman and her suffering children, who live about a square from here in Lear's Court." Paul stood thoughtfully a moment before handing her the basket, and said—"That court has a very bad reputation; had I not better accompany you? I hope you will not consider my offer as an intrusion, but I do not think it is safe for you ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... desire of open vengeance for an open slight, attended with displeasure at the same, the slight being put upon self, or upon some dear one, unbefittingly. The vengeance that the angry man craves is a vengeance that all shall see. "No, ye unnatural hags," cries Lear in his fury, "I will do such things,—what they shall be yet I know not, but they shall be the terror of the earth." When we are angry, we talk of "making an example" of the offender. The idea is that, as all the world ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... triumph, she snatches a dagger, exclaiming, "I will trust my resolution and my good hands." With the same swift instinct, Cassius trusts to his hands when he stabs Caesar: "Speak, hands, for me!" "Let me kiss your hand," says the blind Gloster to Lear. "Let me wipe it first," replies the broken old king; "it smells of mortality." How charged is this single touch with sad meaning! How it opens our eyes to the fearful purging Lear has undergone, to learn that royalty is no defence against ingratitude and cruelty! Gloster's ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... brigades in General Butler's division; Lieutenant-Colonels Garland and Wilson, commanding brigades in General Twiggs' division; Colonels Mitchell, Campbell, Davis, and Wood, commanding the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and 2d Texas regiments, respectively; and Majors Lear, Allen, and Abercrombie, commanding the 3d, 4th, and 1st regiments of infantry; all of whom served under my eye, and conducted their commands with coolness and gallantry against the enemy. Colonel Mitchell, Lieutenant-Colonel ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... Lear, the artist, traveling in Greece, says that "he was one day jogging along with an Albanian peasant, who said to him, 'Women are really better than donkeys for carrying burdens, but not so good as mules.'" ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... in these parts with a gun or a fishing-rod. Forbye, I would rather walk ae mile on the hill wi' ye than twae, for ye gang up a brae-face like a mawkin! God! There's no a single man's trade that ye're no brawly fitted for. And then ye've a heap o' book-lear that folk learned ye away about England, though I cannot speak muckle on that, no being ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... attributing the founding of all the principal cities to some ruler of this line, the historian relates the story of King Leir, the founder of Leicester. As this monarch's life has been used by Shakespeare for one of his dramas,—the tragedy of "King Lear,"—and is familiar to all students of English literature, there is no need to outline Geoffrey of Monmouth's version ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... laws, having practised in the same," and his experience and sagacity in all public affairs—he was a scholar and loved all the arts. "He founded," says Pitscottie, "ane triumphant college in Sanct Androis, called Sanct Salvatore's College, wherein he made his lear (library) very curiouslie and coastlie; and also he biggit ane ship, called the Bishop's Barge, and when all three were complete, to wit, the college, the lear, and the barge, he knew not which of the three was the costliest; for it was reckoned ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... In the choice of subjects there was a like breadth. Balakirew was inspired by "King Lear," as was Tschaikowsky. And amid a wealth of Slavic legend and of kindred Oriental lore, he would turn to the rhythms of distant Spain ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... reason, but by faith. And he too repeats that Shakespeare was a great artist, and he buys the complete works of Shakespeare and puts them on his shelves, and he goes to see the marvellous stage-effects which accompany *King Lear* or *Hamlet*, and comes back religiously convinced that Shakespeare was a great artist. All because the passionate few could not keep their admiration of Shakespeare to themselves. This is not cynicism; but truth. And it is important that those who ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... 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 • William Makepeace Thackeray
... such as support vigorously the action of his group. We say vigorously; for Mr. Rothermel, in his Italian pictures, revealed an artistic nature related to humanity in its most agitated moods, as in the "Lear," and in the "Saint Agnese,"—this beautiful picture being, however, a higher conception, inasmuch as in it the spirit might find some rest in the stillness of the maiden Agnese, already saint and about to be martyr, and in the deep blue sky, on whose field ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... man to watch them. A maid shewed us up stairs into a room damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table, and forms of the same kind; and out of a wretched bed started a fellow from his sleep, like Edgar in King Lear, 'Poor Tom's a-cold'. [Footnote: It is amusing to observe the different images which this being presented to Dr Johnson and me. The Doctor, in his Journey, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... field of recreation, and put up signs: "all church members are warned against trespassing on these grounds, under penalty of the law," instead of trying to teach Christians how to avail themselves, with profit and safety, of any part of the field. We are cut off from Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello and Macbeth. We cannot avail ourselves of the interpretation of these by the best histrionic talent, because the theater has been suffered to fall so completely into the Devil's hands, that a Christian cannot countenance ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... 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 ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... his brethren was not simply an historian, he was one of the great dramatic geniuses of the world, master of a vivid minuteness like Defoe's, and able to touch the springs of tears by a pathetic simplicity like his who painted the death of Lear. Surely theories of legend and of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... wrung his hands. "I see you are resolved to drive me to distraction. This is the final stroke. My daughter wishes to desert me. Lear," he added, piteously, "was only a touch to me. You are Goneril ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... Young's 'Night Thoughts', where the phrase occurs three times. See also 'Lear', act IV. scene vi. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... Cutts, applying himself diligently to the decanter; "but you don't drink. Do you know you put me a good deal in mind of Macready? Did you ever hear him in Lear, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the case that even parents in old age have had occasion to say with the forsaken King Lear, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!" It is right training in early life alone that ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... am, alas! without Instruction in the art of fippling, Though something may be found about It in the works of LEAR or KIPLING. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... its adopted children far outnumbering those of its own blood. It absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of thieves and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words with no pedigree like those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.[4] ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... have a letter in my pocket from a young friend in a country company, the ladies of which have their sensibility strung up to so fine a tone that he cannot take the tragedy of King Lear for his benefit, because not one of them will play either Regan or Goneril. If their feelings are so exquisite in the country, where our wise laws treat players as vagabonds, what must they be when loaded with all the legal, tragic, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... triumphed 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
... the Reliques had indirectly preferred a claim to the praise of invention, by not concealing that his supplementary labours were considerable! how selfish his conduct, contrasted with that of the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance!—Open this far-famed Book!—I have done so at random, and the beginning of the Epic Poem Temora, in eight Books, presents itself. 'The blue waves ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... George Rogers Clark, as he 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French king, in "Lear," was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age. They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius. The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... recalls "King Lear." For "loving like salt," see the parallels collected by Cosquin, i. 288. The whole story is a version of the numerous class of Cinderella stories, the particular variety being the Catskin sub-species analogous to Perrault's Peau d'Ane. "Catskin" ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... out into the unsympathetic world. Chekhov is the dramatist, not of action, but of inaction. The tragedy of inaction is as overwhelming, when we understand it, as the tragedy of an Othello, or a Lear, crushed by the wickedness of others. The former is being enacted daily, but we do not stage it, we do not know how. But who shall deny that the base of almost all human unhappiness is just this inaction, manifesting ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... days later he became more enthusiastic, and wrote: "You will be very proud of 'Le Pere Goriot.' My friends insist that nothing is comparable to it, and that it is above all my other compositions."[*] Certainly the vivid portrait of old Goriot, that ignoble King Lear, who in his extraordinary passion of paternal love rouses our sympathy, in spite of his many absurdities and shortcomings, is a striking instance of Balzac's power in the ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the latter class, who have been branded as traitors and villains, were single-minded, earnest, valiant men; and, as for even O'Flynn, and those worse than him, what was really the matter with them was, that they were too honest—they spoke out too much of their whole minds. Bewildered, like Lear, amid the social storm, they had determined, like him, to become "unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"—seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... ye broken men?" Quo' fause Sakelde; "come tell to me!" Now Dickie of Dryhope led that band, And the nevir a word of lear had he. ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... finds each contribution well worth the setting. For a leading article we have something that is well nigh unique in literature, either amateur or professional, an attempted reconstruction of a scene supposedly excised from "King Lear." This is so unusual, in fact, that it might well be called a "stunt," but certainly it is a successful stunt. In the not overly long scene presented, which pictures the ruthless hanging of Cordelia and the Fool before the eyes of the aged Lear, we can ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... 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 ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... does not describe persons, it presents them in action; and a description, where it occurs, is often designed merely to throw light on the character and feelings of the speaker. "Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low" is a description rather of Lear, as he hangs over the dead body of Cordelia, refusing to believe that she is dead, than of Cordelia herself. "An excellent thing in woman" is not a doctrine, but a last heartbreaking movement of defiance, as if to refute any stander-by who dares ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... was formerly a favourite pickle; hence the "dangerous trade" of the samphire gatherer ("King Lear," act iv. sc. 6) who supplied the demand. It was sold in the streets, and one of the old London cries was "I ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... pleasures in which the soul of man most delights that of sympathy is surely the chief. It can unite and mingle not only two but ten millions of spirits as one. Could a world be spectators of the sorrows of Lear, a world would with one consent participate in them: so omnipotent is the power of sympathy. It is the consolation of poverty, it is the cordial of friendship, it is the essence of love. Pride and suspicion are its chief enemies; and they are ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... offspring of the gods and giants of the dawn of time. For 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 canopy of heaven, ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... rags Do make their children blind; But fathers that wear bags Do make their children kind. —Shakespeare (King Lear, ii. 4). ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Philoctetes, the other play of Sophocles' old age, closes in peace. The old fiery passions still burn fiercely in Oedipus, as they did in Lear; yet both were "every inch a king" and "more sinned against than sinning". Oedipus' miraculous return to strength before he departs is curiously like the famous end of Colonel Newcome. There are subtle but unmistakable marks of the Euripidean influence on this drama; such ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... children of Lir or Lear forms one of those three tales of the old Irish Bards which are known traditionally in Ireland as "The Three Sorrows of Story Telling." It has been told in verse by Aubrey de Vere ("The Foray of Queen Meave, and Other Legends," London, 1882), ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... bows her face down 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, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Colombano. "If I were to permit myself to dwell in detail on the exquisite variety and charm of the drive, especially after quitting the route forestiere a little E. of the hamlet of Palasca, I should wander far from the main purpose of this paper. Valery, Gregorovius, Lear and others have done justice to its wonderful beauty, and the last truly remarks that 'those who visit Corsica without going through upper Balagne remain ignorant of one of its finest divisions,' adding, 'no description can ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... Coriolanus. Titus Andronicus. Romeo and Juliet. Timon of Athens. The Life and death of Julius Caesar. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Tragedy of Hamlet. King Lear. Othello, the Moore of Venice. Anthony and Cleopater. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... poets and handed down from generation to generation, like the poetical traditions of every people in primitive times. There can be no doubt that Geoffrey collected a number of these old stories and wove them into his narrative. Thus, the story of King Lear and his daughters has the ring of a genuine popular tradition about it, though the dates and pseudo-historical setting were probably supplied by Geoffrey. Again, there were certainly prophecies attributed to Merlin current in Geoffrey's time. But ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... that day, if we may judge from the accounts which we have of their poor commons, would have used far different words, in addressing the Faculty, from King Lear, who, speaking to his daughter ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... disappeared. The masquerade was over; and again, through the darkness, rose the plaintive "All's well!" And it kept ringing in my ears until it became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free. It was like the voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: "Never, never, never, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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
... of the above is, that he wanted to 'stint me of my sizings,' as Lear says,—that is to say, not to propose an extravagant price for an extravagant poem, as is becoming. Pray take his guineas, by all means—I taught him that. He made me a filthy offer of pounds once, but I told him that, like ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... intelligence and a great beauty in her time. She was once taken out to dinner by General Washington when he was President. Madam Hancock, whose husband had been President of the Continental Congress and Governor of Massachusetts, complained to General Washington's Secretary, Mr. Lear, that that honor belonged to her. The Secretary told General Washington, the next day, what she said. The General answered that it was his privilege to give his arm to the handsomest woman in the room. Whether the reply was communicated to Mrs. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the Preterite Tenses, he adopts the Part of the Verb now described, employing it in an impersonal acceptation, without a Nominative to it expressed. One or two examples will serve to exhibit the use and effect of this anomalous Tense:—Shuidh an ['o]g bhean air sgeir, is a s['u]il air an lear. Chunnaic i long a' teachd air barraibh nan tonn. Dh' aithnich i aogas a leannain, is chlisg a cridhe 'n a com. Gun mhoille gun tamh, buailear dh' fhios na traighe; agus faighear an laoch, 's a dhaoine m' a thimchioll. In English thus: The young woman sat on a rock, and her eye on the sea. She ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... 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 ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... affectionately called Kittie Clive, was as dear to the excellent Mrs. Garrick as to her brilliant husband. The friendship of David Garrick was also one of the most delightful features in the life of the admirable Hannah More. A letter written by Hannah on seeing him play Lear, greatly pleased him, and led to their acquaintance. Acquaintance soon ripened into a warm esteem, and produced a friendship of the most cordial—and intimate character, which lasted until death. He declared that the nine muses had taken up their residence in her mind; ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... awhile about a swampy churchyard in the suburb of Maria Hilf, to see the melancholy spot of light which glimmered at each grave-head, I went to the Burg Theatre, and witnessed Shakespeare's play of "King Lear" (and the best actor in Vienna played the Fool); and further, that I spent the evening of Christmas Day in Daum's coffee-house in reading Galignani's Messenger, in order to bring myself, in imagination at least, ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... principal actor in them, and no end of speculations as to his inducements and purposes to be served in taking so much trouble. For Shampuashuh people were shrewd, and did not believe, any more than King Lear, that anything could come of nothing. That he was not moved by general benevolence, poured out upon the school of the white church, was generally agreed. "What's we to him?" asked pertinently one of the ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... the poet in addressing so composite an audience are enormous: cuteness, coyness, archness and condescension are only the most obvious ones. Some great writers of children's verse—Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear—have successfully hedged themselves against these dangers by insistent comedy and parody (Carroll's "serious" children's verse is maudlin and embarrassing). By this means they have contrived what the child will take as lovely, unintimidating, mysterious, rational nonsense, and what the adult will ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... 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 ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... whither he was brought by Thetis, whose mother's prayer had moved the Heart of Zeus, to dwell with Cadmus and Peleus, is Achilles' true home; or the isle of the heroes of all time, described by Carducci, where King Lear sits telling OEdipus of his sufferings, and Cordelia calls to Antigone, "Come, my Greek sister! We will sing of peace to our fathers." Helen and Iseult, silent and thoughtful, roam under the shade of the myrtles, while the setting sun kisses their golden hair with its reddening rays. ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... titles nor in rank; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest. It's no in makin' muckle mair; It's no in books; it's no in lear; To make us ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... software limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early 'dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See {tube}, {tty}; compare {dumb terminal}, {smart terminal}. See "{TV Typewriters}" (Appendix A) for an interesting true story about ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... paper lightly sold, Which few pence had made too dear On its blank to have enscrolled Beatrice, Lucifer, or Lear! ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Just fancy a horse that comes full pelt, But as quiet as if he was shod with felt, Till he rushes against you with all his force, And then I needn't describe of course, While he kicks you about without remorse, How awkward it is to be groomed by a horse! Or a bullock comes, as mad as King Lear, And you never dream that the brute is near, Till he pokes his horn right into your ear, Whether you like the thing or lump it, - And all for want of ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... Shakespeare's 'King Lear' and 'Cymbeline' came from Geoffrey's 'Historia Britonum,' as did also the story of 'Gorboduc,' the first tragedy in the English language. Milton intended at one time that the subject of the great poem for which he was "pluming his wings" should be King Arthur, as may ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creation of a nation's spirit; and the artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, but gave it form, and nothing but form. Nor would the form itself have been attained by any isolated ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Beethoven concert, in the morning there was an extra seance of the orchestra for the performance of the Overtures to "King Lear" (Berlioz) and to the "Meistersinger," my march "Vom Fels zum Meer," the "Ideales," and Brahms' Variations on a theme of Haydn. Always the same and complete understanding in the ensemble and the details of the scores,—the same vigor, energy, refinement, accuracy, relief, vitality and superior characteristics ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... lendings!' That is how Shakespeare lays the mind of man bare, and strips him of his pretences, to try if he be indeed noble. And he finds that man, naked and weak, hunted by misfortune, liable to all the sins and all the evils that follow frailty, still has faith left to him, and charity. King Lear is ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... gabs[21] a lesson lear: Wad they to labouring lend an eident[22]hand, They'd rax fell strang upo' the simplest fare, Nor find their stamacks ever at a stand. Fu' hale an' healthy wad they pass the day; At night, in calmest slumbers dose fu' sound; Nor doctor need their weary life ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... door of the house behind him. In the barn he threw himself, face downward, on a heap of loose straw, and there lay motionless. His wife wept alone in her bed, and hardly missed him: it required of her no reflection to understand whither he had gone, or what he was doing. He was crying, like King Lear from the bitterness of an outraged father's heart, to the Father ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... man grinned. "See how she bullies a poor old man, Jim. I'm worse than that Lear fellow in the play—most henpecked father you ever ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... I mean to end, so I'll begin. And as for you, George, there's no end to your softness. You're that green, that the very cows would eat you." Was it not well said by Mr. Robinson in his preface to these memoirs, that the poor old commercial Lear, whose name stood at the head of the firm, was cursed with ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... answered Mr. Lear, rather surprised by these words. "The doctor will give you relief, I trust, ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... many Mr. Irvings? When a man can act "The Two Roses" and "The Dead Heart" with equal effect, when he can at will be as vulgar as Robert Macaire, or as dignified as Cardinal Wolsey; when he can be either as young as Hamlet or as old as Lear, the inquiry as to his plurality becomes natural and pertinent. For my part, I rank Mr. Irving the comedian above Mr. Irving the tragedian, just as I rank Nature above Art: each may be highest in its own way, yet the one may have a charm which the other cannot boast. Mr. Irving's ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... shifts the crown to the head of his son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,—this King Victor has something in him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an Albany, no weakling ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 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 of ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... table, with some vile jest tacked to it "like a tin kettle to a dog's tail," he awoke to the full measure of his misery—the cup was full. Fate had done her worst, and he might have exclaimed with Lear, "spit, fire-spout, rain," there was nothing in store for ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... short-story for the reason that they are not constructed for one single impression, but are in reality parts of possible longer stories. They are, as it were, parts of stories not unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and A Lear of the Steppes, and lack those complete and concise artistic effects found in the short-stories, Markheim and Mumu, by the same authors. Both Ruth and the Prodigal Son are exceptionally well told, possess a splendid moral tone, and are excellent prophecies of what the nineteenth ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... on, "My prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings will never mark it. Think'st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling the hour in Caesar's Rome, buried that Roman 'stead o' burning him and gave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. Go ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... be perform'd in York-Buildings a 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... 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 cases ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... its womb, usurped its throne, and ever since the maddened old creature, with hoary crest of foam, wails and laments continually, like King Lear exposed to the fury ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... the Court and come All fresh and fragrant, to the drawing-room; In hues as gay, and odours as divine, As the fair fields they sold to look so fine. "That's velvet for a king!" the flatterer swears 'Tis true, for ten days hence 'twill be King Lear's. Our Court may justly to our stage give rules, That helps it both to fools-coats and to fools. And why not players strut in courtiers' clothes? For these are actors too, as well as those: Wants reach all states; they beg ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... death Devrient was summoned to Berlin, where he was for fifteen years the popular idol. He died there on the 30th of December 1832. Ludwig Devrient was equally great in comedy and tragedy. Falstaff, Franz Moor, Shylock, King Lear and Richard II. were among his best parts. Karl von Holtei in his Reminiscences has given a graphic picture of him and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... smell of the forest as it is borne down from the mountains and carried seaward, to gladden, it may be, the heart of some hard-worked, broken-spirited sailor, who, in a passing ship, sees from aloft this fair, fair island with its smiling green of lear, and soft, heaving valleys, above the long lines of curving beach, showing white and bright in the morning sun! And, as you walk, the surf upon the reef for ever calls and calk; sometimes loudly ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... 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: Probably the "Larghetto" from the F minor Concerto. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... remember well that this engraving by Sharp was one of the few ornaments in the drawing-room of Macaulay when I last saw him, shortly before his lamented death. Next to the Doctors of the Church is his LEAR IN THE STORM, after the picture by West, now in the Boston Athenaeum, and his SORTIE FROM GIBRALTAR, after the picture by Trumbull, also in the Boston Athenaeum. Thus, through at least two of his masterpieces whose originals ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... I tell the wonders of an isle That in that fairest lake had placed been, I could e'en Dido of her grief beguile; Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen: For sure so fair a place was never seen, Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye: It seem'd an emerald in the silver sheen Of the bright waters; or as when on high, Through clouds of fleecy white, ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... capable of instantaneous abandonment to his part, and of as instantaneous withdrawal from it,—like the elder Booth, joking one minute at a side-scene and in the next having the big tears of a realized Lear running down his cheeks. An eminent critic says,—"Genius always lights its own fire,"—and this constant double process of mind,—one of self-direction and self-control, the other of absolute abandonment and identification,—each the more complete for the other,—the dramatic poet, the impassioned ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... ouer their Dogges, their Dogges deliuered and murdered, the shepe were immediat- ly deuoured: So saieth he, if ye shall ones deliuer to Philip, the king of the Macedonians your Oratours, by whose lear- nyng, knowlege and wisedome, the whole bodie of your do- minions is saued, for thei as Bandogges, doe repell all mis- cheuous enterprises and chaunses, no doubte, but that raue- nyng Wolfe Philip, will eate and consume your ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... disproportion'd cage, } Mourn'd his contracted strengths and crippled rage. } He who could tame his vast ambition down To please some scatter'd gleanings of a town, And, if some hundred auditors supplied Their meagre meed of claps, was satisfied, How had he felt, when that dread curse of Lear's Had burst tremendous on a thousand ears, While deep-struck wonder from applauding bands Return'd the tribute of as many hands! Rude were his guests; he never made his bow To such an audience as salutes us now. He lack'd the balm of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... much in the manner in which Shakspeare's fools and jesters—in some respects the wisest and thoughtfullest characters in his works—talk. If his words be "light as air," they vent "truths deep as the centre." If the Fool in "Lear" had written letters to his friends and acquaintances, I think they would have marvellously resembled this epistle to Patmore; and if, in saying this, I compliment the Fool, I hope I do not derogate from the genius of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the small annoyances, the squalid cares of even the greatest leaders of men and the brave outward show of their reception by the masses. And the other scene of which I thought, was the appearance of Mr. Irving on a first night in some big play, say, like "Lear." All the public know is that the actor is there, on the stage, to pronounce his kingly speech; but, before he has got there, Mr. Irving, perhaps, has had the sleepless nights which are required in thinking out the smallest details of his business; perchance, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... to the testimony of the father. I find myself incapable of speaking of him or his testimony with severity. Unfortunate old man! Another Lear, in the conduct of his children; another Lear, I apprehend, in the effect of his distress upon his mind and understanding. He is brought here to testify, under circumstances that disarm severity, and call ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... draw back the veil from the "bitter close of all," and to show that the hardest part of her work began when she laid down her sword, and the ending years of her life were the saddest and weariest portion. Never since the days of Lear has such a tale been told of a parent's sacrifice and of a child's ingratitude. In the royal home of the Duke of Bretagne, there was no room for her but for whose love and care he would have been a homeless fugitive. ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... had been urging Tobias Lear, Washington's secretary, to get out of Washington's papers remarks injurious to himself, was greatly exercised at the publication of Marshall's book about as much as the better element dudes are at ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... characters are what we call marrying men. Mercutio, as he was own cousin to Benedick and Biron, would have come to the same end in the long run. Even Iago had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like Jacques and the Fool in LEAR, although we can hardly imagine they would ever marry, kept single out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference for the single state. For that matter, if you turn to ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... was more depressing than ever. During the lonely days, and still more lonely nights, he thought much about the past. He knew that he had made a failure of life, and that he had nothing to live for now. At times he would endeavor to fan the coals of rebellion by reading "King Lear," "Timon of Athens," and the story of Old Aeneas. But the effect was never lasting, and when the artificial stimulation subsided he ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... brilliant novel after another, steadily accomplishing for Devon what Mr. Hardy did for Wessex. This is another of Mr. Phillpotts' Dartmoor novels, and one that will rank with his best.... Something of kinship with 'King Lear' ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... to show those at home how easy it was to get there; how easy to get home again. Moreover, though going to sea in the Shannon was not quite the same 'as going to sea in a sieve,' our stay-at-home friends were of the same mind as those of the dear little Jumblies, whom Mr. Lear has made immortal in his New Book of Nonsense; and we were bound to come back as soon as possible, and not 'in twenty years or more,' if we ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Junction City, Kansas, has written a series of short stories on the property rights of women in Kansas, a subject that was and is, still, of vital importance to the women of the state. "The Legal Status of Mrs. O'Rourke" and "King Lear in Kansas" ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... "sufficiencies" was, by an inarticulate speaker, or inattentive hearer, confounded with "sufficiency as", and how "abled", a word very unusual, was changed into "able". For "abled", however, an authority is not wanting. Lear uses it in the same sense, or nearly the same, with the Duke. As for "sufficiencies", D. Hamilton, in his dying speech, prays that "Charles II. may exceed both the VIRTUES and ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... attributes save piety, are upon his pages as real, and as mysterious withal, as they are in the great historical society. For an ordinary reader, these states and attributes are more real in Hamlet or Lear than in his own direct experience, because in Hamlet and Lear he can see them with the eye and intelligence of genius. But Shakespeare is the world all over again, and there is loss as well as gain in such realism. Here is human life, no ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... this scene, as described by the pen of Shakspeare, has brought tears into millions of eyes. The tragedy of King Lear and his wretched daughters is known throughout the civilized world. What heart is not indignant at such treatment? Who does not abhor the conduct of ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... Lear I pour'd for the deep imprecation, By my daughters of kingdom and reason depriv'd: Till fir'd by loud plaudits, and self adulation, I consider'd myself as a ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... divined—he could not tell why—that these girls were motherless. His eyes fell on the open book which the elder sister laid on the chair as she rose. The firelight enabled him to read its page-heading, printed in thick, blunt type—"King Lear"! These girls, the one of them about to visit unknown England, were reading ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Gaul. For the converse task, to-day not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of presenting England to the French intelligence—or, indeed, to any other alien intelligence—you may choose the play "King Lear." ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... sympathy is universal, and therefore so is his interest. He sees the like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great. It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most deeply colors the imagination. When the boy is wandering through fields, sitting in the shade of trees, or lying on the banks of ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... best played; a tragedy is best read at home." He was much pleased one night with Mr. McCullough's delineation of the character of "Edgar," which the actor played in support of Edwin Forrest's "Lear." He wished to convey his approval to the young actor, and asked Mr. Brooks, his companion at the moment, with characteristic simplicity, "Do you suppose he would come to the box if we sent word?" Mr. McCullough was summoned, and, standing at the door of the box ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... from childhood, in a fragmentary way. "The Tempest," and "Midsummer Night's Dream," and "King Lear," I had swallowed among my fairy tales. Now I discovered that the historical plays, notably, "Julius Caesar" and "Coriolanus," had no less attraction for me, though of a different kind. But it was easy for me to forget that I was trying to be a literary student, and slip off ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... a period of poverty with the Strick family, and Loveday was sent to fetch the evening milk from the farm at the crest of the hill. On the way, she came upon Cherry Cotton and Primrose Lear, seated upon a granite stile, their heads together over something Cherry held in her lap. Cherry heard approaching footsteps, and whipped her apron over the object she and her friend had been so busily discussing. Loveday was hurt rather than angered by the unkind ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... personification. Thus at one time*1* he likens men to clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the browsing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads; while at another he addresses an old red hill of Georgia as "Thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer."*2* Like other Southern poets,*3* Lanier sometimes fails to check his imagination, and in consequence leaves his readers "bramble-tangled in a brilliant maze," as in his description ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... for the loss of her son—then look at Lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters: why it is the west wind bowing those aspen tops that wave before our window, compared to the tropic hurricane, when forests crash and burn, and ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Prince's Bay on Staten Island. A long, bright column told of the doings in the theatrical world—the plays produced, the actors appearing, the managers making announcements. Fannie Davenport was just opening at the Fifth Avenue. Daly was producing "King Lear." He read of the early departure for the season of a party composed of the Vanderbilts and their friends for Florida. An interesting shooting affray was on in the mountains of Kentucky. So he read, read, read, rocking in the warm ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any addition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful; for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample playroom of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... her lover knows the hysterica passio of poor Lear, but "I had scarce given vent to my feelings in this paroxysm ere I ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... old Minister 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
... play, 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 ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... theatre; and he promised in return to furnish them with a play every year, if his health would permit. Two years passed, however, before he produced the Mourning Bride, a play which, paltry as it is when compared, we do not say, with Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands very high among the tragedies of the age in which it was written. To find anything so good we must go twelve years back to Venice Preserved, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the fret of heart and soul, The loneliness and passion of King Lear; No more bewilderment and broken words Of wild despair ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... less striking and unfamiliar. From the dead branches of those skeleton pines and hemlocks, these rampikes, hang masses of white moss, snow-white, amid the dark verdure. An actor might wear such a beard in the play of King Lear. Acadian children wore such to imitate "grandpere," centuries ago; Cowley's trees are ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... 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
... been sight-seeing in Boston all day, was to dine and go to the theatre with us afterwards. The talk naturally turned upon the stage. Longfellow said he thought Mr. Charles Mathews was entirely unjust in his criticisms upon Mr. Forrest's King Lear. He considered Mr. Forrest's rendering of the part as very fine and close to nature. He could not understand why Mr. Mathews should underrate it as he did. Longfellow showed us a book given him by Charles Sumner. In it was an old engraving (from a painting ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... our thought And in his fellowship our pain is healed; And we are likest God when we are brought Most near to all men. Bring us near to him, The gentle, human soul whose calm might wrought Imperious Lear and made our eyes grow dim For Imogen,—who, though he heard the spheres "Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubim," Could laugh with Falstaff and his loose compeers And love the rascal with the same big heart That o'er Cordelia could ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... pictures on the walls. First of all there was Guido Reni's Aurora, while opposite it hung English etchings of pictures by Benjamin West, made by the well known aquatint process. One of the pictures was King Lear in the storm on ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... 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 belong ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... He found us free men, and did not try to make us slaves. On the contrary, he gave us a representative Constitution, which has lasted a thousand years. We might call him our Manx King Alfred, if the indirections of history did not rather tempt us to christen him our Manx King Lear. His Saga has never been written, or else it is lost. Would that we could recover it! Oh, that imagination had the authority of history to vitalise the old man and his times! I seem to see him as he lived. There are hints of his ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... reaches, as it were, the central fire, in the heat of which every separate faculty, every animal want, every fortuitous incident is melted down and lost. We never could observe in actual experience passion such as Lear's, or meditation such as Hamlet's, fusing everything else into itself. Facts at every step would interfere to prevent such a possibility. But let us place ourselves, by the poet's help, within the soul of Lear or Hamlet, ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... language, but it lacked the wealth of expression and the flexibility necessary to respond to the most delicate touches of the master-musicians who were to come. When Shakespeare has Lear say ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... found imitators, abbreviators and continuators. Among its early admirers it had that indefatigable reader of novels, William Shakespeare, who took from it several hints, especially from the story of the "Paphlagonian unkind king," which he made use of in his "King Lear."[219] Books were published under cover of Sidney's name, as "Sir Philip Sydney's Ourania";[220] others were given away bearing as an epigraph an adaptation ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... 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 solemnly. ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... monk wore out his days in copying the treasures of antiquity, and used his imagination in embellishing the lives of saints and martyrs. When the manuscript is found which settles the exact date of King Lear's reign, I cannot doubt that it will give all particulars about ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... than those sudden leaps from society, and M. Egiste Brancadori, who kept the Marzocco, was one of those unconscious buffoons of whom he was continually in search in real life, one of those whom he called his "Thebans", in reference to King Lear. "I'll talk a word with this same learned Theban," cried the mad king, one knows not why, when he meets ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... 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, ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... copied my mother's letters as they were written, omitting only the purely family matter which is of no interest to the public. Edward Lear's drawing of Luxor was printed in 'Three Generations of Englishwomen,' edited by Mrs. Ross, but the other illustrations are now reproduced for the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Marquis de Noriolis, feeble in his folly and wandering in helplessness, but irresistible when aroused, is a striking figure; and still more striking is the portrait of his wife, now the Marquise de Noriolis, but once Fanny Lear the adventuress—a woman who has youth, beauty, wealth, everything before her, if it were not for the shame which is behind her: gay and witty, and even good-humored, she is inflexible when she is determined; hers is a velvet manner and an iron will. The name of Fanny ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It is not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry. Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded thunder-stone" in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up Wilton's Virgilian "fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... whose limber tongue there was constantly leaping words unprintable and names of tar, deserves no soft pity at our hands. All his life he had been training his three daughters for exactly the treatment he was to receive. All his life Lear had been lubricating the chute that was to give him a quick ride out into that black ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... true Antonio on the stage than to see the true moonlight shimmering on the trees in Belmont Park. But sometimes the play will transcend the limits of stage expression by being too purely and perfectly dramatic, as in "Lear." For not only is it, as Lamb points out,[3] impossible for the actor to give the convulsions of the father's grief, and yet preserve the dignity of the king, but the sustained intensity of passion fatigues both ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... the following terms: "How little Shakspeare was once read, may be understood from Tate, who, in his dedication to the altered play of King Lear, speaks of the original as an obscure piece, recommended to his notice by a friend; and the author of the Tatler, having occasion to quote a few lines out of Macbeth, was content to receive them from Davenant's ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... spectacles thoughtfully, and, as he resumed his work, a sounding flood of tragic utterance came out of him—the great soliloquies of Hamlet and Macbeth and Richard III and Lear and Antony, all said with spirit and appreciation. The job finished, they bade ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... Shakespearian humour which lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate Iago and Shylock with the visible presence of Kean, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... said Will to himself; "ye little ken that the Laird o' Gilnockie, whom ye tried to deprive of his birthright, sits afore ye; and will a' the lear 'neath that big wig tell ye that that same Laird o' Gilnockie sits here contriving a plan to run awa wi' ye? Faith, an' it's a bauld project; but the baulder the bonnier, as we say in Liddesdale. I only wish I could tak her wig and gown wi' her—for, if the lurdon were seen looking ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... proposed measure, but the Court had considered it as being nos poma natamus. I kept our friends quiet by declining to move in a matter which was to expose us to the insult of a certain refusal. Clerk, with his usual felicity of quotation, said they should have remembered the Clown's exhortation to Lear, "Good nuncle, tarry and take ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... the King, is, like Agamemnon, a warrior-king. But, unlike Agamemnon, he is blameless with regard to Gertrude. Yet Gertrude, like Clytemnestra, is the potential murderer of her husband, as Lady Macbeth is murderess, as the daughters of Lear. The women murder the supreme male, the ideal Self, the King ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... 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
... his mother tongue. "The ladies praised his voice and the music, but were more struck with the softness and sonorousness of the Russian language." I remember being similarly affected years ago when I heard "King Lear" read aloud in Russian. Baron von der Bruggen says,* "there is the wonderful wealth of the language, which, as a popular tongue, is more flexible, more expressive of thought than any other living tongue I know of." No one has paid a ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... bad woman. Let people overburdened with credulity believe that she is bad," cried Doederlein, with the expression and in the tone and gesture of the royal Lear, and shook his Olympian locks. "The fact is that violence has been practised on her; she has been driven into ruin! Men have stolen the sweet love of my dearly beloved daughter through the use of vile tricks and artifices. Where is she, the unfortunate, betrayed child? With what is she ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann |
