Biographia Dramatica: pt.1. Authors and Actors: A-H

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Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1812 - Dramatists, English
 

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Page lxiv - Ah! let not Censure term our fate our choice, The stage but echoes back the public voice ; The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live.
Page 140 - I had little thoughts of the stage; but did it, to amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness. Afterwards, through my indiscretion, it was seen, and in some little time more it was acted; and I, through the remainder of my indiscretion, suffered myself to be drawn into the prosecution of a difficult and thankless study, and to be involved in a perpetual war with knaves and fools.
Page 268 - The person who acted Polly, till then obscure, became all at once the favourite of the Town. Her pictures were engraved and sold in great numbers, her life written, books of letters and verses to her published, and pamphlets made even of her sayings and jests. ' Furthermore, it drove out of England for that season the Italian opera, which had carried all before it for ten years...
Page 188 - He was a zealous opposer of the Court, and a sacrifice for it : was conscientiously converted in the midst of his prosecution of Lord Strafford, and was most unconscientiously a prosecutor of Lord Clarendon. With great parts he always hurt himself and his friends. With romantic bravery, he was always an unsuccessful commander. He spoke for the Test Act, though a Roman Catholic ; and addicted himself to astrology on the birth-day of true philosophy.
Page 211 - Tom observed to me, that after having written more odes than Horace, and about four times as many comedies as Terence, he was reduced to great difficulties by the importunities of a set of men, who, of late years, had furnished him with the accommodations of life, and would not, as we say, be paid with a song.
Page xv - England* began first that language ; all our ladies were then his scholars ; and that beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism...
Page 105 - We knocked at the door (not attempting to pull the latch-string), which was opened by a tall, meagre, ragged figure, with a blue apron, indicating what else we might have doubted, the feminine gender ; a perfect model for the copper captain's tattered landlady — that deplorable exhibition of the fair sex in the the comedy of Rule-a-Wife. She with a torpid voice and hungry smile desired us to walk in.
Page 140 - There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance. The Old Bachelor was written for amusement, in the languor of convalescence. Yet it is apparently composed with great elaborateness of dialogue, and incessant ambition of wit.
Page 334 - This play was composed in little more than a week, on which account it is no wonder that it should be, as he himself has described it, "an unpruned wilderness of fancy, with here and there a flower among the leaves; but without any fruit of judgment.
Page 215 - ... the hunting of Theseus, with which the young scholars, who stood in the windows, were so much taken (supposing it was real), that they cried out, " Now, now! — there, there! — he's caught, he's caught!" All which the Queen merrily beholding, said, " O, excellent ! those boys, in very troth, are ready to leap out of the windows, to follow the hounds.