"Lear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... paw, capered limpingly after its own shadow flung by the moonlight on the greensward, and attempted in its own playful way to attract the attention of its new master and wile him away from his mood of utter misery. Involuntarily he thought of the frenzied cry of Shakespeare's "Lear" over the dead body ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... 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
... 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 as he ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... childhood's days I took delight In LEAR'S immortal Dong, Whose nose was luminously bright, Who sang a silvery song. He did not terrify the birds With strange and unpropitious words Of double-edged ontong; I'm sure he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... 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 has seen us slighted and set at naught, so all the world, witnessing the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... 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 ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... 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, and to us, it ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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 ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... savory, parsley, bruised with the back of a ladle, and give them two or three walms on the fire in the broth; then dish the chines in thin slices of fine French bread, broth them, and lay on them some boiled beef-marrow, boil'd in strong broth, some slic't lemon, and run all over with a lear made of beaten butter, the yolk of an egg or two, the juyce of two or three ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... 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 edition ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 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
... selecting plays that could offend neither morality nor delicacy. There are many things upon the stage which are sinful, vicious, and vulgar, but there are hundreds of books quite as bad and dangerous. As we choose only the best volumes to read, so be sure to select only pure plays and operas. 'Lear' would teach you the awful results of filial disobedience; 'Merchant of Venice,' the sin of avarice; 'Julius Caesar' that of unsanctified ambition. There are threads of wisdom, patience, charity, and heroism which might be gathered from the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... duty to the Court and come All fresh and fragrant, to the drawing-room; In hues as gay, and odours as divine, As the fair fields they sold to look so fine. "That's velvet for a king!" the flatterer swears 'Tis true, for ten days hence 'twill be King Lear's. Our Court may justly to our stage give rules, That helps it both to fools-coats and to fools. And why not players strut in courtiers' clothes? For these are actors too, as well as those: Wants reach all states; ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... him into an anteroom, where she sat down and, in spite of her excitement, looked at the 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 ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... because he starts from within. He reaches, as it were, the central fire, in the heat of which every separate faculty, every animal want, every fortuitous incident is melted down and lost. We never could observe in actual experience passion such as Lear's, or meditation such as Hamlet's, fusing everything else into itself. Facts at every step would interfere to prevent such a possibility. But let us place ourselves, by the poet's help, within the soul of Lear or Hamlet, and we shall be ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... the word in the modern meaning I have found. Richardson has it in both its modern meanings, "vigorous," or "sensitive in nerves, and consequently weak, diseased." Hysteria is not in the Bible, and is found once in Shakespeare; as, "Hysterica passio, down," Lear ii. 4. It was common in Sydenham's day,—i.e., Charles II. and Cromwell's time,—but he classified under hysteria many disorders no longer considered as ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... 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
... of his which Mr. Jones's biography, all unconsciously, reveals. Butler, it is clear, was morbidly vain. Many writers are so, but few let their vanity take them so far. Learn from Mr. Jones. In 1879 he and Butler met Edward Lear in an inn at Varese. He told them a little tale about a tipsy man from Manchester—rather a good little tale. "I do not remember that Edward Lear told us anything else particularly amusing, but then neither did we tell him anything particularly amusing. Butler was ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... in the Civil War as captain in the 28th Massachusetts infantry regiment. From 1867 to 1870, with John McCullough, he managed the California theatre, San Francisco. Among his many and varied parts may be mentioned Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard III., Wolsey, Benedick, Richelieu, David Garrick, Hernani, Alfred Evelyn, Lanciotto in George Henry Boker's (1823-1890) Francesca da Rimini, and James Harebell in The Man o' Airlie. He played Othello to Booth's Iago and Cassius to his Brutus. He acted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... be ye gaun, ye broken men?' Quo' fause Sakelde; 'come tell to me!' Now Dickie of Dryhope led that band, And the nevir a word o' lear ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... mediaeval chronicle, and to create from a few meagre suggestions a vital and impressive work of art. One thinks instinctively, in seeking for some adequate parallel, of what Goethe did with the materials of the Faust legend, or of what Shakespeare did with the indications offered for 'King Lear' and 'Cymbeline' by Holinshed's chronicle-history. And the two greatest names in modern literature are suggested not only by this general fact of creative power, but also more specifically by certain characters in the trilogy. Audhild, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the matchless prose and the not particularly lordly verse of As You Like It are by the same hand; that the master to whom we owe our Hamlet is also responsible for Gertrude and King Claudius; that he who gave us the agony of Lear and the ruin of Othello did likewise perpetrate the scene of Hector's murder, in manner so poor and in spirit so cynical and vile—is beyond all belief and patience; and we have argued the point to such an extent that we are all of us in Gotham, and a mooncalf like the ascription ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... when there arises in their hearts a pleasure in the growing number of his years expressly as these constitute a deduction from the unknown sum total of those which have been appointed him; and when the utmost bravery of their affection must breathe, not Serus, but CITO in cadum redeas! O royal Lear of our literature, who have spurned from your love the dearest daughter of your thought, is it only left us to say, "How friendly is Death,—Death, who restores us to free relations with the whole, when our own fierce partialities have imprisoned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... impressive, he plainly showed, that he thought, there was too much of artificial tone and measured cadence, in the declamation of the theatre. The present writer well remembers being in conversation with Dr. Johnson, near the side of the scenes, during the tragedy of King Lear: when Garrick came off the stage, he said, "You two talk so loud, you destroy all my feelings." "Prithee," replied Johnson, "do not talk of feelings, Punch has no feelings." This seems to have been ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... troublesome, Lear to whose limber tongue there was constantly leaping words unprintable and names of tar, deserves no soft pity at our hands. All his life he had been training his three daughters for exactly the ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... likeness to all this in the early days of the history of London. Apart from all legends of the Troy Novant, of Lud and Lear and that King Lucius who sanctified Cornhill, legends which have their counterpart in all the old histories of Rouen, there are almost as few relics of the fortified barrack on the Thames, or of the more pretentious ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... His humorous illustrated poems, such as Max und Moritz, Der heilige Antonius von Padua, Die Fromme Helene, Hans Huckebein and Die Erlebnisse Knopps des Junggesellen, play, in the German nursery, the same part that Edward Lear's nonsense verses do in England. The types created by him have become household words in his country. He invented the series of comic sketches illustrating a story in scenes without words, which have inspired Caran ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... "manners" or styles—the first containing such lighter, friendlier work, as "Life's Little Ironies," "Under a Greenwood Tree," and "The Trumpet Major"—the second being the period of the great tragedies which assume the place, in his work, of "Hamlet," "Lear," "Macbeth" and "Othello," in the work of Shakespeare—the third, of curious and imaginative interest, expresses in quite a particular way, Mr. Hardy's own peculiar point of view. The Well-Beloved, Jude the Obscure, and the later poems would ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... intellectual material of a rakish Stratford lad's schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years' association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... man paused, drawn up to his fullest height, imposing as a new King Lear, his deep, dark eyes ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... everybody groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful mixture of fun and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but everybody in the park called him, 'Father William'; and when he wanted to know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory deceives me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be steeped in the blood of the deer; Shylock ordered one pound of the carcase; Hamlet (the fact was impressed on me) ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... written by both Charles Lamb and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the work was originally produced it had illustrations ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... of September the Constitution frigate, Captain Preble, with Mr. Lear on board, was within two days' sail of Gibraltar, where the Philadelphia would then be arrived with her prize, and such explanations would probably be instituted as the state of things required, and as might perhaps ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... King Lear. Apple, balm, burdock, cork, corn, crab, fumiter, hemlock, harlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, darnel, flax, hawthorn, lily, marjoram, oak, oats, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... waiting to get rid of. He told a pitiful story of himself and his old wife, who made the paper horrors in her bed, and how they needed everything, but didn't wish to beg. I was much touched, and flew home to look up the coat and some shoes, and when my old Lear came creeping in the back way, I ordered cook to give him a warm dinner and something nice ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... He executed his infamous functions throughout Flanders, Douay, and Tournay, the most thriving and populous portions of the Netherlands, with a swiftness, precision, and even with a jocularity which hardly seemed human. There was a kind of grim humor about the man. The woman who, according to Lear's fool, was wont to thrust her live eels into the hot paste, "rapping them o' the coxcombs with a stick and crying reproachfully, Wantons, lie down!" had the spirit of a true inquisitor. Even so ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Lieutenant-Colonels Garland and Wilson, commanding brigades in General Twiggs' division; Colonels Mitchell, Campbell, Davis, and Wood, commanding the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and 2d Texas regiments, respectively; and Majors Lear, Allen, and Abercrombie, commanding the 3d, 4th, and 1st regiments of infantry; all of whom served under my eye, and conducted their commands with coolness and gallantry against the enemy. Colonel Mitchell, Lieutenant-Colonel McClung, Mississippi regiment, Major Lear, 3d ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... by Dr. Whately to the fact that "all men are more gratified at catching the resemblance for themselves, than in having it pointed out to them." But after what has been said, the great economy it achieves will seem the more probable cause. Lear's exclamation— ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... limbs shook like those of a palsied old man. I sank upon a stone to rest, to try and arrange my scattered ideas into some sort of connection and order. Mad! I clasped my aching head between my hands, and brooded on the fearful prospect looming before me, and in the words of poor King Lear, I prayed in ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... with its spirit of caste; with its spirit of hatred, and tell me whether it was written by a good God. Why, if you will read the maledictions and curses of that book, you would think that God, like Lear, had divided heaven among his daughters, and then, in the insanity of despair, had launched his curses upon ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... till his vanity and his fancied security have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful there. In the figure of the maddened Lear ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... worked 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'." ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... 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 ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... 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
... went through the Forest, sometimes by green rides, enchanted still, such as those down which Lancelot rode with Guinevere, talking of love, sometimes over heaths wild and desolate such as that which knew the bitterness of Lear, sometimes through the greenwood, ancient British woodland, silent now, where the hart was once at home in the shade, and where at every turn one might expect to come upon Rosalind in her boy's dress, and think to hear from some glade the words ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... familiar Chester. About the second case, that of Leicester, there is a slight difficulty, for it assumes in the Chronicle the form of Laegra ceaster, with an apparently intrusive letter; and the later Welsh writers seized upon the form to fit in with their own ancient legend of King Lear. Nennius calls it Cair Lerion; and that unblushing romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes it at once into Cair Leir, the city of Leir. More probably the name is a mixture of Legionis and Ratae, Leg-rat ceaster, the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... or Mr. Philip Gibbs. My friend M. Joseph Reinach has successfully passed off long extracts from my story as descriptions of the Tanks upon British officers who had just seen them. The filiation was indeed quite traceable. They were my grandchildren—I felt a little like King Lear when first I read about them. Yet let me state at once that I was certainly not their prime originator. I took up an idea, manipulated it slightly, and handed it on. The idea was suggested to me by the contrivances of a certain Mr. Diplock, whose "ped-rail" notion, the notion ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... is actually fixed for the Christmas holidays, when his cousin undertakes to die for positively the last time, and his uncle will play in the most natural manner conceivable, the last act of "King Lear."' In fact, this family calamity was rather a cheerful subject among Devereux's friends; and certainly Devereux had no reason to love that vicious, selfish old lunatic, Lord Athenry, who in his prodigal and heartless reign, before ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the road had a charm, however; there is something picturesque in the big, comfortable shoulders of the Cote. That delicate critic M. Emile Montegut, in a charming record of travel through this region published some years ago, praises Shakespeare for having talked (in "Lear") of "waterish Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point. I stopped at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque, but I might almost have seen the little I discovered without stopping. It is a drowsy Burgundian town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Van de Lear's son, Calvin. He's going to succeed his venerable and pious poppy in Kensington pulpit. They'll let ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... almost hopeless task now to discover the causes of his insomnia. He wrote a marvellous body of literature, and it might be thought this labor itself would suffice as an explanation: that the furnace heat in which the conceptions of Hamlet and Macbeth and Lear were wrought in the crucible of his brain would be fatal to repose. But his contemporaries speak of him as an easy and rapid writer; one whose imagination is only paralleled by the ease, the force and beauty of the phrase in which it is embodied. We are told, too, by Dr. H.A. Johnson, ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... not been very courteous towards the worsted gentry; had he lived in our times, they might have worsted him for a libel: he says in King Lear, "A base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three suited, hundred ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... reached the second reading of this play by the way which I have pointed out to him. And why, indeed, should Ulysses not speak for Shakespeare, or how could it be other than that he should? The man who had written "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," and "Macbeth," if he wished to find Ulysses, had only to turn his mind's eye inward; and thus we have in this drama Shakespeare's ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... has made us laugh! A whole generation of men Smiled in the joy of his wit. But who knows whether he was not Like those deep jesters of old Who dwelt at the courts of Kings, Arthur's, Pendragon's, Lear's, Plying the wise fool's trade, Making men merry at will, Hiding their deeper thoughts Under a motley array,— Keen-eyed, serious men, Watching the sorry world, The gaudy pageant of life, With pity and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was powerfully accentuated in America by the very conditions of its colonization. The good yeomen of England who journeyed to America went in the spirit of the noble and intrepid Kent, when, turning his back upon King Lear's temporary injustice, he said that he would "shape his old course in a country new." Was it strange that the early colonists, as they braved the hardships and perils of a dangerous voyage, only to be confronted in the wilderness by disease, famine and massacre, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it now the cynicism of Measure for Measure, now the despair of Hamlet and of Lear, now the radiant magnanimity of the Tempest, and departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series of mutually ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... conceded, had not 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 King, the Falcon, and the Drinking Cup, in Dutton, The Tortoise and the Geese; The Lark and her Young Ones, in Scudder, Book of Fables and Folk-Stories; The Monk and the Bird, in Scudder, Book of legends; The Owl and his School, in Ramaswami Raju, Indian Fables; The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, Lear (poem), in Story-Telling Poems; The Partridge and the Crow, in Dutton, The Tortoise and the Geese; The Pious Robin, in Brown, Curious Book of Birds; The Rustic and the Nightingale, in Dutton, The Tortoise and the Geese; The Sparrows, Thaxter ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... We walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... 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 ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... proprietor of this hotel, was the principal manager in the unloading of the records and furniture belonging to the government when the ships bringing it from Philadelphia docked at Lear's Wharf. Abraham Bradley, who, as Assistant Postmaster General, had charge of the removal of that department, and Joseph Nourse, who was Registrar of the Treasury, may also have stopped at Crawford's until settled in ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... Praetor, Consul, Proconsul, and Imperator, so as to get what he could of power and wealth and dignity in the scramble, was, I think, Caesar's purpose. The rest grew upon him. As Shakspeare, sitting down to write a play that might serve his theatre, composed some Lear or Tempest—that has lived and will live forever, because of the genius which was unknown to himself—so did Caesar, by his genius, find his way to a power which he had not premeditated. A much longer time is necessary for eradicating an idea from men's minds than a fact from their practice. ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... and the crown be given? Lord Bacon had a kingly soul, capacious great thoughts, and high designs, but no one who has read his metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical quatrains, the sacred hymns of Isaac Watts are howling and bacchanalian anacreontics, to be hiccoughed by drunkards in their ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... manse of Dullarg, with a sedate and old-fashioned reverence which sat strangely on one of his years. "Be faithful with the young man," continued the letter; "he is well grounded on the fundamentals; his head is filled with godly lear, and he has sound views on the Headship; but he has always been a little cold and distant even to me, his father according to the flesh. With his companions he is apt to be distant and reserved. I am to blame for the solitude of our life here in James's Court, but to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... in "King Lear." Avarice closes the palace doors against the white-haired King. Greed pushes him into the night to wander o'er the wasted moor, an exiled king, uncrowned and uncared for. In such hours garden becomes desert. This is the drama of man's life. The soul thirsts for sympathy. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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
... for Booth's playing. A farce or a comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home." He was much pleased one night with Mr. McCullough's delineation of the character of "Edgar," which the actor played in support of Edwin Forrest's "Lear." He wished to convey his approval to the young actor, and asked Mr. Brooks, his companion at the moment, with characteristic simplicity, "Do you suppose he would come to the box if we sent word?" ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... feature of the forest primeval presents itself, not 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 "Patricians," these ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... 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 Condition of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... youthful days:—"An honest countryman came one day to Mr. Linton (head master of the grammar school) with a halflin[807:A], a long, empty chap, who had taken it into his head that he would have some little learning. Said the father, 'Mr. Linton, ye see, my laddie's fond o' lear'[807:B], and I'm thinking o' makin' a scholar o' him.' 'But,' said Mr. Linton, looking at the youth, and not seeing any sign that there was much in him, 'What are you to make of him?' 'You see, Mr. Linton,' rejoined the father—and it showed how sound the old Scotchman ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... office. You may think I have not seen Paris and Helen, but I have. And I have seen Orestes and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Oedipus. Do you suppose I have not met Tarquin and Virginia and Lucretia and Shylock—to come down to nearer times—and seen Lear and studied Macbeth in the flesh? I knew Juliet once, and behind locked doors I have talked with Romeo. They are all here in any American commonwealth at the close of our century: the great tragedies are numbered—the oldest are the newest. ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... 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 ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... 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, laughs the ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... 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 then introduced ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... There was a mixture of novelty, of joy, of patriotic enthusiasm, felt by every heart. A committee of twelve was appointed in town-meeting to superintend the reception. The president left his carriage at Greenland, at the residence of Colonel Tobias Lear, and mounted his favorite white horse; he was there met by Colonel Wentworth's troop, and on Portsmouth plains the president was saluted by Major General Cilly, and other officers in attendance. From the west end of the State House, on both sides ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... 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
... comfortably in lodgings, in Dove Court, Mansion House. He was soon hard at work upon 'The Death of Rizzio,' adorning his walls with pictures he had brought with him or sent for afterwards from Kendal, such as 'King Lear,' 'Elfrida,' 'The Death of Lefevre,' and a few portraits of friends. The Rizzio picture has been represented as 'a work of extraordinary merit, combining energetic action with strong expression.' Its fate was sad enough; attracting no notice, producing ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, these are names indeed of something more than tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distance beyond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagination seems to melt or flow back into the ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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
... true one, the effect had been lessened by the fact that nothing has been left to the imagination. On the other hand there has, since Shakespeare, been nothing so fine as the treatment of Pere Fouan, that peasant King Lear, by his ungrateful family. It has been urged that Zola overdid the horrors of the situation and that no parent would have been so treated by his children. By a singular chance a complete answer to this objection may be found in a paragraph which appeared ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... 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 in the subject or material ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... 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 ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry and strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... leans 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 murderer ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... threatened with the humiliation of gracing Caesar's triumph, she snatches a dagger, exclaiming, "I will trust my resolution and my good hands." With the same swift instinct, Cassius trusts to his hands when he stabs Caesar: "Speak, hands, for me!" "Let me kiss your hand," says the blind Gloster to Lear. "Let me wipe it first," replies the broken old king; "it smells of mortality." How charged is this single touch with sad meaning! How it opens our eyes to the fearful purging Lear has undergone, to learn that royalty is no defence against ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... 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 "poor ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... Falstaff, all Shakespeare's 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 George Sand's French ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Lear's, Cliff at Dover is one of the first things to which the transatlantic up-channel traveller's attention is called. Blind old Gloster ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... best of 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 belong to the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... from faults, major or minor, juvenile or non-juvenile; wondrous, inasmuch as the author is still very young, not many years, indeed, in advance of his majority. There is exaggeration, we grant, in passages, but it is exaggeration as essential to the circumstances and the characters as Lear's insane language is to his madness, or Othello's turbid tide of figures to his jealousy. The hero—an enthusiast—speaks always in enthusiastic terms; but of extravagance we find little, and of absurdity or affectation none. Diffusion ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Rutzen, ordered the destruction of 272 volumes of the English translation of Balzac's "Les Contes Drolatiques" on the ground that the book was obscene. "Les Contes Drolatiques" is an acknowledged masterpiece, and is not nearly so free spoken as "Lear" or "Hamlet" or "Tom Jones" or "Anthony and Cleopatra." What would be thought of a French magistrate or a German magistrate who ordered a fair translation of "Hamlet" or of "Lear" to be burnt, because of its obscenity? He would be regarded ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... 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 ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... 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 ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... 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 it thus, ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... 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 ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... suffered card-playing to take place, raffles, or St Leger sweeps to be held in his house. "You have seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar, and the creature run from the cur. There thou might'st behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office." You have—very well. Take crazy King Lear's words as a text for a sermon against legislative inconsistencies, and come back ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of composition, and in popular estimation at least among English readers, comes, 'Le Pere Goriot.' It is certainly trite to call the book a French "Lear," but the expression emphasizes the supreme artistic power that could treat the motif of one of Shakespeare's plays in a manner that never forces a disadvantageous comparison with the great tragedy. The retired vermicelli-maker is not as grand a figure as the doting King ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... 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 thinking ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Macaulay, who, like the still more ignorant Doctor Samuel Johnson, knew nothing of the venerable language of the first inhabitants of the British Isles, and of all Western Europe, resolve themselves into Li! Li Beur! Lear-a! Buille na la, which signify, "Light! Light! on the sea, beyond the promontory! 'Tis the stroke (or dawn) of the day!" Like all the choruses previously cited, these words are part of a hymn to the sun, and entirely ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... Parallels.—The beginning 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" was told by ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... noted, a student of Bergson at the Ecole Normale—found his ideal in the great story of the young girl of Domremy who saved France when all the pomp and wisdom of generals had broken down. And in our own poetry has not Mr. Bottomley rewritten the Lear story, with the focus of power and interest transferred from the old king—left with not an inch of king in him—to ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... not sleep. The wind poured in my ear Immortal names—Lear, Hamlet, Hal, Macbeth, And thro the night I heard the rushing breath Of ghost and witch and fool go whirling by. I followed them, under the phantom sphere Of the pale moon, along the Avon's near And nimbused ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... are accustomed to call the most universal genius that ever existed. He has a truly wonderful variety. It is almost impossible to pronounce in which he has done best, his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Othello. He is equally excellent in his comic vein as his tragic. Falstaff is in his degree to the full as admirable and astonishing, as what he achieved that is noblest under the auspices of the graver muse. His poetry and the fruits of his imagination are unrivalled. His language, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... of heart and soul, The loneliness and passion of King Lear; No more bewilderment and broken words Of wild ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... most valuable works of an author are published in the course of the last seventeen years of his life. I will rapidly enumerate a few, and but a few, of the great works of English writers to which my plan is more favourable than my noble friend's plan. To Lear, to Macbeth, to Othello, to the Fairy Queen, to the Paradise Lost, to Bacon's Novum Organum and De Augmentis, to Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, to Clarendon's History, to Hume's History, to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not above broad farce when the fancy seized him. At the time when a certain kind of nonsense verse was popular, he, with Sir Noel Paton and others, added not a few facetious sonnets to Edward Lear's book, which lay on Madame Novikoff's table. His authorship is betrayed by the introduction of familiar Somersetshire names, Taunton, Wellington, Curry ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind; Or if, o'er-confident, she trust the date, And, with her handful of anemones, Herself as shivery, steal into the sun, The season need but turn his hour-glass round, And Winter suddenly, like crazy Lear, Reels back, and brings the dead May in his arms, Her budding breasts and wan dislustred front 30 With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard All overblown. Then, warmly walled with books, While ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... 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 ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... comparing was introduced into English, both methods were often used with the same adjective; and, for a time, double comparatives and double superlatives were common; as, worser, most boldest. In "King Lear" Shakespeare uses the double comparative a dozen times.]; as, valuable, less valuable, least valuable. Most definitive and many descriptive adjectives cannot be compared, as their meaning will not admit ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... 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
... 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, dressed all ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... meaning in the tumbledown houses "the dumb rhetoric," in which "tables, chairs, and joint stools are living, and significant things." In these passages Lamb seems to regard the comic merely as a means to an end;—"Who sees not," he asks, "that the grave-digger in Hamlet, the fool in Lear have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt; while the comic stuff in 'Venice Preserved,' and the doggrel nonsense of the cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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 ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... man grinned. "See how she bullies a poor old man, Jim. I'm worse than that Lear fellow in the play—most henpecked father ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... great 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. ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... 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 have—oh, yes, ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... about in its fitful gusts, and he rather liked it. In his anguish of spirit it was a pleasure to contend with the storm. The wind, the lightning, the sudden sharp claps of thunder were on his own key. He felt in the temper of old Lear. The winds might blow and ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... children of Rury, huge 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 ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... completion in a dreamy guess. Now Time grants night the more and day the less: The gray decides; and brown Dim golds and drabs in dulling green express Themselves and redden as the year goes down. Sadder the fields where, thrusting hoary high Their tasseled heads, the Lear-like corn-stocks die, And, Falstaff-like, buff-bellied pumpkins lie.— Deepening with tenderness, Sadder the blue of hills that lounge along The lonesome west; sadder the song Of the wild redbird in the leafage yellow.— Deeper and dreamier, aye! Than ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... translation, to be sure; but the bold descriptions, the heroic incidents, witches, and ghosts were exactly to my taste. I immediately acted Shakspeare's plays on my little puppet theatre. I saw Hamlet's ghost, and lived upon the heath with Lear. The more persons died in a play, the more interesting I thought it. At this time I wrote my first piece: it was nothing less than a tragedy, wherein, as a matter of course, everybody died. The subject of it I borrowed from an old ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... them. A maid shewed us up stairs into a room damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table, and forms of the same kind; and out of a wretched bed started a fellow from his sleep, like Edgar in King Lear, 'Poor Tom's a-cold'. [Footnote: It is amusing to observe the different images which this being presented to Dr Johnson and me. The Doctor, in his Journey, compares ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... revising my edition 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, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... a bad woman. Let people overburdened with credulity believe that she is bad," cried Doederlein, with the expression and in the tone and gesture of the royal Lear, and shook his Olympian locks. "The fact is that violence has been practised on her; she has been driven into ruin! Men have stolen the sweet love of my dearly beloved daughter through the use of vile tricks and artifices. Where is she, the unfortunate, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... was inflamed. Every nerve in her was alive. All she had ever felt for Dyck Calhoun came rushing to the surface, demanding recognition, reasserting itself. As she used the words, "ever and ever and ever," it was like a Cordelia bidding farewell to Lear, her father, for ever, for there was that in her voice which said: "It is final separation, it is the judgment of Jehovah, and I must submit. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... utter ruin, and migrates to the 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 ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... is a cliff, whose high and bending head Looks fearfully on the confined deep; Bring me but to the very brim of it, And I'll repair the misery thou dost bear. King Lear. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... guardian angel ever since my blindness. She does all my writing, reads the plays and my notes to refresh my memory. She was reading King Lear this afternoon, and I was much stirred by the sad trials of the poor old king. I mentally compared my lot with his and found that the advantage is mine. He had no home, two ungrateful daughters, and, as far as I can learn, no 'shadow ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... to keep her father stimulated with frequent cups of coffee. The whiskey flask appeared to be quite forgotten. After supper, at his suggestion, Elsie brought out an old dog-eared set of Shakespeare. In the flaring light of a homemade tallow candle he read parts of "King Lear" and "Hamlet," with his rapt eyes frequently off the page for a dozen ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... (vociferous) 411 stentorian, stentorophonic|. Adv. loudly &c. adj. aloud; at the top of one's voice, at the top of one's lungs, lustily, in full cry. Phr. the air rings with; "the deep dread-bolted thunder" [Lear]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... cannot help feeling that Pindar's Isle of the Blest, 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. Helen ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... Nature? What were the elements, the invisible backgrounds and eidolons of it, to Homer's heroes, voyagers, gods? What all through the wanderings of Virgil's Aeneas? Then to Shakspere's characters—Hamlet, Lear, the English-Norman kings, the Romans? What was Nature to Rousseau, to Voltaire, to the German Goethe in his little classical court gardens? In those presentments in Tennyson (see the "Idylls of the King"—what sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold Nature, inimitably ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the ass's head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the insistence on the swarthiness of Othello, or the deformity of Richard III. Shakespeare's work is much more than picturesque; ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Shakespearian width of sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... bad, eh? [Quickly] Wait, now, here's something from King Lear. The sky is black, see? Rain is pouring down, thunder roars, lightning—zzz zzz zzz—splits the ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... which shows it to have been a decided hit on the stage. And indeed there is no resisting the delectable humour of it: but then the thing is utterly inimitable; Shakespeare being no less unapproachable in this vein than in such delineations as Shylock and Lear ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... tragedian, born in London, associate of Shakespeare, took the chief role in "Hamlet," "King Lear," ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... remained, the one reading, the other sleeping, while the hours of the warm summer afternoon slipped away, ripples on the ocean of the lovely, changeless eternity, the consciousness of God. For a time the watching sister was absorbed in King Lear; then she fell to wondering whether Cordelia was not unkindly stiff toward her old father, but perceived at length that, with such sisters listening, she could not have spoken otherwise. Then she wondered whether there could be women so ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... Like old Lear, Sophocles was cursed with ungrateful children. Shakspeare's imagination went no further than TWO ungrateful daughters: Sophocles had in reality four sons, all as ungrateful as those monsters of Shakspeare's brain. The extreme ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... 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" ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... kind of drama, as a redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... 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, General Eaton might have marched ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... are repeated or read at many of the library story hours. Lear's nonsense rhymes and certain rhythmical story poems are especially enjoyed by the children. Outlines of stories or selections from books designed to lead to the reading of an entire book are mentioned in connection with ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is to say, as I truly can, I am very anxious to see it again. Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any un-professional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard III., Henry VIII., Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... much persuasion, to join the rest of the party at dinner. In the evening, all (Fairthorn excepted) draw round the fire. Waife is entreated by George to read a scene or two out of Shakespeare. He selects the latter portion of "King Lear." Darrell, who never was a playgoer, and who, to his shame be it said, had looked very little into Shakespeare since he left college, was wonderstruck. He himself read beautifully—all great orators, I suppose, do; but ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that of the Verona houses. There is always feud where there is not understanding. There is eternal feud between those two camps of misunderstanding, age and youth. This play, written by a young man, shows the feud from the point of view of youth. The play of King Lear shows it from the point of view of age. This play of youth is as lovely and as feverish as love itself. Youth is bright and beautiful, like the animals. Age is too tired to care for brightness, too cold to care for beauty. The bright, beautiful ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield |
