Deed and a Word, A.—Charles Mackay. Donald and the Stag.-Robert Browning.. Duchess May.-Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Echo and the Ferry.-Jean Ingelow.. Flood on the Floss, The.-George Eliot.. Vision of Poets, A.—Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Witches' Frolic, The.-Richard H. Barham.. PEAK the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue: do SPEAK not mouth it, nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and ̧ whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise. I 'would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve. Oh, there be players that I have seen play-and heard others praise, and that highly,-not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, not man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. Oh, reform it altogether! -SHAKESPEARE. |