A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

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Hogan & Thompson, 1833 - Drama - 442 pages

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Page 351 - Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts ; Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance ; Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i...
Page 280 - How absolute the knave is ! we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. By the Lord, Horatio, these three years I have taken note of it ; the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe. How long hast thou been a grave-maker? First Clo. Of all the days i' the year, I came to 't that day that our last king Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
Page 196 - Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : The genius, and the mortal instruments, Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.
Page 321 - Say, there be ; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean ; so, o'er that art Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes.
Page 299 - This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a kind of wit. 60 He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time, And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man's art.
Page 292 - He paints, in a most inimitable manner, the gradual progress from the first origin ; " he gives," as Lessing says, "a living picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which every other passion is made subservient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions.
Page 282 - O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand...
Page 296 - ... properties subsist in him peaceably together. The world of spirits and nature have laid all their treasures at his feet: in strength a demi-god, in profundity of view a prophet, in all-seeing wisdom a guardian spirit of a higher order, he lowers himself to mortals as if unconscious of his superiority, and is as open and unassuming as a child.
Page 323 - By the manner in which he has handled it, it has become a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which elevates even the senses themselves into soul...
Page 9 - Hence the poetry of the ancients was the poetry of enjoyment, and ours is that of desire : the former has its foundation in the scene which is present, while the latter hovers betwixt recollection and hope.

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