The Cambridge History of English Literature: The drama to 1642

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Sir Adolphus William Ward, Alfred Rayney Waller
The University Press, 1910 - English literature - 533 pages

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Page 118 - Fletcher's ideas moved slow ; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn ; he lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shakspeare mingles every thing, runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors ; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for disclosure.
Page 368 - I sit by and sing, Or gather rushes, to make many a ring For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love; How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes She took eternal fire that never dies ; How she...
Page 125 - A tragi-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near to it, which is enough to make it no comedy...
Page 47 - Selden, and others: at the midst of the feast his old Mother dranke to him, and shew him a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prisson among his drinke, which was full of lustie strong poison, and that she was no churle, she told, she minded first to have drunk of it herself.
Page 24 - If there be never a servant monster in the fair, who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antiques ? he is loth to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries...
Page 313 - Why, heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow ! he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.—Bur.
Page 8 - Timber, or Discoveries made upon men and matter, as they have flow'd out of his daily Readings, or had their refluxe to his peculiar Notions of the Times. By Ben: Johnson. Tecum habita, ut noris quam sit tibi curia supellex. Pers. Sat. iv. London, Printed M.DC.XLI.
Page 34 - I found I had been cozened with a jelly ; nothing but a cold, dull mass, which glittered no longer than it was shooting...
Page 369 - Here she was wont to go ! and here ! and here ! Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow . The world may find the spring by following her, For other print her airy steps ne'er left. Her treading would not bend a blade of grass, Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk ! But like the soft west wind she shot along, And where she went, the flowers took thickest root, As she had sowed them with her odorous foot.

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