Dutton Cook

“ Still the stage can find room and subsistence of a sort for all, even for mutes. But carry a banner, walk in a procession, or form one of a crowd, and you may still call yourself actor, though not an actor of a high class, certainly. The histrionic calling is a ladder of many rungs. Remain on the lowest or mount to the highest—it is only a question of degree—you are a player all the same.
The Thespian army had no need of a recruiting-sergeant or a press-gang to reinforce its ranks. There have always been amateurs lured by the mere spectacle of the foot-lights, as moths by a candle. ”

“ Violet asked, almost fiercely. The baby was on the sofa now, curled up, calm, beautiful, quite unconscious of the great grief afflicting those so near to it. “He would not take it from me? It is all mine now; it is all I have in the world now! It is for my baby only that I wish to live, my poor baby, who has no father now—my poor baby, who has no one now to look to for comfort, and support, and protection; no one but a wretched mother, whom, by-and-by, he will be taught to hate.” She bent over the child as though to shield it from harm. ”

“ But there is nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play, though he has done nothing but stalked solemnly across the stage, or rose through a cleft in it and sunk again without speaking one word. There may be a proper season for these several terrors, and when they only come in as aids and assistances to the poet, they are not only to be excused but to be applauded. ”

“ There is no reason to believe that any disadvantage accrued to Turner from his somewhat uncheerful birthplace. It is hardly the Venetians who are the most alive to the beauties of Venice. But Mr. Ruskin is fond of mounting a richly-caparisoned charger of the imagination, and caracoling round a crotchety circus; and his feats in this respect are so elegantly and admirably fantastic, that we almost forbear to smile, out of deference to so perfect a non-perception of humour, when we find him tracing the painter back to Covent Garden Market in all his paintings. ”

“ Oh, Wilford, I will speak the words—you are a monster, and a coward, and a villain! You have wronged, past all reparation, one of the best and purest and noblest creatures that ever lived upon God’s earth. Shame on you! Violet may not hate or despise, but I do. I am less forgiving, as I am less good, less beautiful: in every way inferior to her. ”

“ It is difficult to conceive any correspondence, any rapport between workmanship so exquisite, and a workman in every way so unattractive, so little estimable. But just as from the small dusky insect in the hedges at night proceeds a phosphorescent flame of great power and beauty—just as from a miserable-looking, coarse, common flint are emitted sparks of superb brilliance,—so from the hands of this strange, sordid, shambling man came art-achievements almost without precedent in the history of painting. ”

“ The stage storm still bursts upon the drama from time to time; the theatre is still visited in due course by its rainy and tempestuous season; and thunder and lightning are, as much as in Addison's time, among the favourite devices of our playwrights, "put in practice to fill the minds of an audience with terror." The terror may not be quite of the old kind, but still it does well enough. ”

“ She loved music for its own sake, and she sang Mozart's songs with all her love and heart and soul in her voice.
Most charming of composers! Let us listen for pomp and passion and solid grandeur to Beethoven; for religion to Handel; for weirdness and mystery to Weber and Meyerbeer; for orchestral epilepsies or tortured tunes let us search in the spasmodic scores of modern Italy; but for the poetry of tenderness, for the heart's own sentiment, shall we ever find these in greater perfectness than in the music of Mozart? ”

“ That he should have aided in the art-training and forming of the greatest of landscape painters is a real tribute to the merits of De Loutherbourg. It is something to have been even the fuel that helped the fire of a great genius to burn the more brightly.
The characteristics of the old scene-painter's art which attracted the attention of Turner, were doubtless the boldness and strength of his effects: his rolling clouds and tossing waters; his sudden juxta-positions of light and shade; his bright and transparent, if occasionally impure and unnatural, system of colour. ”

“ In the palace as in the cellar, in the churchyard, and in the prison; in all phases of life, even amid scenes it had been better she should have died a hundred times than have lived to know, I have carried on my search. I have ceased to bewilder myself with probabilities, I seek her systematically everywhere. I extend my toil through the night, even into the hours of the morning. Then I have wandered to that lime-tree in the park, consecrated by her memory, and have bowed down in its shadow with my one prayer—that I may meet her yet once again before I die. ”

“ The miniature painter can hardly help improving and refining the subjects he deals with; for one reason, because the delicate nature of the material upon which he works, its exquisite surface and delicate texture, imparts a marked purity to all his tints. The coarsest complexion gains in lustre and smoothness when attempt is made to render it upon ivory; the dainty groundwork gleams through and gives beauty and clearness to the swarthiest hues. And then, in addition to this, Cosway had in full the portrait-painter's faculty of flattering his sitters. ”

“ Fuller stood before Wilford Hadfield.
"My dear boy," said the doctor, heartily, "how glad I am to see you here again! once more at the Grange, Wilford; that's how it should be, isn't it? Yet, how you've changed; how your hand burns, too; you're dreadfully feverish, do you know that? It's the journey perhaps, as you say. I should hardly have known you with that great beard, and all that thick long hair."
Wilford smiled as he tossed back the matted locks from his forehead.
"That's more like you; I know that smile; I know that grand old action of the head to shake the hair from your forehead. ”

“ A little, meagre man, not more than five feet high, in a shabby, patched dressing-gown, almost as old as himself, leading a quiet, cold, penurious life. He never married. He had never even been in love. He had never had the time, or he had never had the passion necessary for such pursuits, or he was too deeply devoted to his profession. He was always, brush in hand, perched up on a temporary stage, painting earnestly, fiercely, 'with the inveterate diligence of a little devil stuccoing a mud wall!' cried flaming Mr. Fuseli. ”