Their Majesties' Servants: Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund Kean, Volume 2

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A. C. Armstrong & son, 1880 - Actors

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Page 15 - Resolved, &c., nemine contradicente, that in all aids given to the king by the Commons the rate or tax ought not to be altered by the Lords.
Page 53 - ild you! They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord! we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Page 318 - The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers, And heavily in clouds brings on the day, The great, the important day, big with the fate Of Cato and of Rome.
Page 325 - ... tis what I prize so well that I ne'er pawned it yet, and hope I ne'er shall part with it. Nature and fortune were certainly in league when you were born ; and as the first took care to give you beauty enough to enslave the hearts of all the world, so the other resolved, to do its merit justice, that none but a monarch, fit to rule that world, should e'er possess it; and in it he had an empire. The young prince 1 you have given him, by his blooming virtues, early declares the mighty stock he came...
Page 80 - ... after long and eager expectation, I first beheld little Garrick, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage, and pointing at the wittol Altamont and heavypaced Horatio — heavens, what a transition! — it seemed as if a whole century had been swept over in the transition of a single scene...
Page 397 - Yes, as rocks are, When foamy billows split themselves against Their flinty ribs ; or as the moon is moved, When wolves, with hunger pined, howl at her brightness.
Page 80 - When Lothario gave Horatio the challenge, Quin, instead of accepting it instantaneously, with the determined and unembarrassed brow of superior bravery, made a long pause, and dragged out the words, ' I'll meet thee there!' in such a manner as to make it appear absolutely ludicrous.
Page 325 - Elysium, in her mundane body, unchanged, " for your soul, which shines through it," says the vile adulator, " finds it of a substance so near her own, that she will be pleased to pass an age within it, and to be confined to such a palace.
Page 162 - I enrolled myself, and never disgraced my colours by abandoning the cause of the legitimate comedy, to whose service I am sworn, and in whose defence I have kept the field for nearly half a century, till at last I, have survived all true national taste, and lived to see buffoonery, spectacle and puerility so effectually triumph, that now to be repulsed from the stage is to be recommended to the closet, and to be applauded by the theatre is little else than a passport to the puppet-show.
Page 408 - He spoke ; but what a speech ! The one I wrote consisted of eight or nine lines ; his was of two or three sentences, but not six consecutive words of the text. His look, his manner, his tone, were to me quite appalling ; to any other observer they must have been incomprehensible. He stood fixed, drawled out his incoherent words, and gave the notion of a man who had been...

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