Our Old Actors, Volume 2

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R. Bentley and son, 1878 - Actors

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Page 201 - 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 27 - I snatched up my candle, and hurried out of the room in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk, and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to my panic-struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. At last I reached my chamber, where I found my husband fast asleep. I clapt my candlestick down upon the table, without the power of putting the candle out, and I threw myself on my bed, without daring to stay even to take off my clothes.
Page 194 - He fought like one drunk with wounds : and the attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after his sword is taken from him, had a preternatural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had a .withering power.
Page 26 - It was my custom to study my characters at night, when all the domestic cares and business of the day were over. On the night preceding that on which I was to appear in this part for the first time, I shut myself up, as usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon accomplish it.
Page 116 - The prince, unable to conceal his pain, Gazed on the fair Who caused his care, And sighed and looked, sighed and looked, Sighed and looked, and sighed again : At length, with love and wine at once oppressed, The vanquished victor sunk upon her breast.
Page 34 - It was something above nature. We can conceive of nothing grander. She embodied to our imagination the fables of mythology, of the heroic and deified mortals of elder time. She was not less than a goddess, or than a prophetess inspired by the gods. Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was tragedy personified. She was the stateliest ornament of the public mind. She was not only the idol of the people, she not only hushed the tumultuous shouts of the...
Page 116 - I was not insensible to all his powers of attraction; I thought him one of the most amiable of men. There was a beautiful ingenuousness in his language, a warm and enthusiastic adoration, expressed in every letter, which interested and charmed me.
Page 123 - Overwhelmed by this blow, my distress knew no limits. Yet heaven can witness the truth of my assertion, even in this moment of complete despair, when oppression bowed me to the earth, I blamed not the prince. I did then, and ever shall, consider his mind as nobly and honourably organized; nor could I teach myself to believe, that a heart, the seat of so many virtues, could possibly become inhuman and unjust.
Page 270 - One morning he descended early into his shop, and looking round with the irresistible humour of Tangent himself, ' It is my cruel fate,' said he, ' that my children will be gentlemen.
Page 137 - Her joyous parts — in which her memory now chiefly lives — in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line, to make up the music — yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather rend, not without its grace and beauty — but, when she had declared her sister's history to be a " blank,"...

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