If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world... is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers' stones, a s...overeign remedy to all diseases ... but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health; hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over... the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre- eminence without too precise a knowledge ...of what it consisted in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this wh...en I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... no one who has not been an integral part of a slaveholding community, can have any idea of its abominations.... even were slav...ery no curse to its victims, the exercise of arbitrary power works such fearful ruin upon the hearts of slaveholders, that I should feel impelled to labor and pray for its overthrow with my last energies and latest breath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »