Lothario

“ Philip looks at the stranger's dissipated eyes, and despite the apparent innocence which the hallowing presence of a guileless ice-cream will temporarily shed over Lothario himself, sees the general demoralisation that has set in.
"He is young to be blunted and coarsened," thinks Philip. Annoyed by the impudent stare which possibly amuses rather than displeases his wife, he tells Eleanor she has had enough, and rises to signify departure. Lothario is still covering Clytie with his gaze. She pauses to caress a lean black cat with hungry eyes, that has crept in unobserved from the street. ”

“ LOTH. Ha! dost thou know me, that I am Lothario?
As great a name as this proud city boasts of.
Who is this mighty man, then, this Horatio,
That I should basely hide me from his anger,
Lest he should chide me for his friend's displeasure?
HOR. The brave, 'tis true, do never shun the light;
Just are their thoughts, and open are their tempers,
Freely without disguise they love and hate,
Still they are found in the fair face of day,
And Heav'n and men are judges of their actions. ”

“ Here has this young Lothario returned, his heart full of death and desperation since the frustration of his first mad impulse to end his difficulties with his life, knowing, or not knowing—we must form our own conclusions as to that—that his destined victim awaits him at the tryst—if tryst it is—her heart burning with bitterness against the seducer who has betrayed her; each resolved on its own way out of the trouble. She upbraids him with her ruin, and threatens in her turn to ruin him, unless he consents to right the wrong he has done her. ”

“ They find Lothario sitting up in bed—his cowl rising pyramid-fashion, a fool’s cap all but the bells—bewildered and in ludicrous consternation at being surprised thus by the fair Angelica; and, unable to conceal his chagrin, he completes his discomfiture by bursting out in wrathful abuse of his laughing host for so betraying his weakness for nightcaps. ”

“ This is kept by the village Lothario, Demetrius, a splendid fellow inclining to corpulency, who wears a ring, a fez, and even goes to the length of washing his hands and face and combing his hair once a day. One is not a village Lothario for nothing. He is married, and hence he adds a disappointed and hopeless air to his fascinating crimson tie whenever he serves or chats with a woman under forty. ”

“ Lothario observed all this, and it inflamed him all the more. In short he felt that while Anselmo's absence afforded time and opportunity he must press the siege of the fortress, and so he assailed her self-esteem with praises of her beauty, for there is nothing that more quickly reduces and levels the castle towers of fair women's vanity than vanity itself upon the tongue of flattery. In fact with the utmost assiduity he undermined the rock of her purity with such engines that had Camilla been of brass she must have fallen. ”

“ The scenery grew dark, and the orangeries, vineyards, and coppice that bordered the way seemed black and sombre, as the stars, like diamonds in a dark-blue dome, twinkled in the early morning sky.
The yellow dawn began to gild its eastern quarter above the distant chain of the Vosges; green hill tops brightened in the rising tide of light, and the vanes of village spires and of old châteaux embosomed among oaks that were perhaps coeval with Lothario, king of Lorraine, glittered in the rosy beams. Squirrels and rabbits fled before us across the road from hedge to hedge ”

“ The character of Lothario seems to have been expanded by Richardson into Lovelace; but he has excelled his original in the moral effect of the fiction. Lothario, with gaiety which cannot be hated, and bravery which cannot be despised, retains too much of the spectator's kindness. It was in the power of Richardson alone to teach us, at once, esteem and detestation; to make virtuous resentment overpower all the benevolence which wit, elegance, and courage, naturally excite ”

“ On returning to Lothario's castle, Wilhelm found that changes had occurred. Jarno met him with the tidings, that, Lothario's uncle being dead, the baron had himself set out to take possession of the heritage. "You come in time," said he, "to help the abbé and me. Lothario has commissioned us to purchase some extensive properties of land in this quarter: he has long contemplated the bargain, and we have now got cash and credit just in season. ”

“ Many an attachment is formed at such amusements, and many a bitter jealousy is excited: the prude and coquette, the fop and rustic Lothario, stand out here as prominently to the eye of him who is acquainted with human nature, as they do in similar assemblies among the great: perhaps more so, as there is less art, and a more limited knowledge of intrigue, to conceal their natural character. ”

“ Lothario alone was such a one, for with the utmost care and vigilance he watched over the honour of his friend, and strove to diminish, cut down, and reduce the number of days for going to his house according to their agreement, lest the visits of a young man, wealthy, high-born, and with the attractions he was conscious of possessing, at the house of a woman so beautiful as Camilla, should be regarded with suspicion by the inquisitive and malicious eyes of the idle public. ”

“ He was no vain, smirking Lothario, but he instinctively guessed how that strong mouth of hers could set, and those hazel eyes blaze and scintillate with dangerous anger at times; and that the man who was ill-advised and—ignorant enough—to ever make the foolish break of misconstruing her careless geniality for anything else but that, was only inviting disaster of the most ignominious and humiliating kind.
Her gaze flitted around the room continually as she appeased her appetite, and he was subjected to an exacting and minute inquisition anent the duties and life of a Mounted Policeman. ”

“ When the young Lothario met him he would find a man—to all seeming—childishly innocent of the facts and fondly incapable of suspicion. He, Eben Tollman, would lead them both slowly into self-conviction by as deliberate a campaign as that which had won him his wife in the first instance.
Stuart Farquaharson came into the hotel breakfast-room that Monday morning with dark rings under his eyes and an unaccustomed throb of pain in his temples. He wore the haggard aspect of one wrestling with a deep anxiety. ”

“ Scarcely a week passes over without a trial for breach of promise of marriage. Sometimes the gay Lothario, to use the phrase of the newspapers, is nineteen, sometimes ninety. In either case his conduct is a frightful tissue of perjured vows and base deception. His innumerable letters breathing all the tenderness of affectionate solicitude, intended but for the eyes of her he loves, are read in open court; attested copies are shown to the judge, or handed up to the jury-box. ”

“ As he afterwards had the delight of telling her, and, as he now reminded himself with a retrospective thrill of feeling, he had experienced, when his eyes first met those of the fair traveller, that incommunicable sensation, part physical, part mental, which your genuine Lothario, if an intelligent man, always welcomes with quickening pulse as the foretaste of special zest to be attached to a coming pursuit. ”

“ This discovery awoke anxieties in Wilhelm. He thought of the beautiful child Felix with the liveliest apprehension, and expressed his wish to remove him from the state in which he was.
"We can soon arrange that," said Lothario. "I think you ought yourself to take charge of him; what in us the women leave uncultivated, children cultivate when we retain them near us." ”

“ Anselmo then died of grief, Lothario was slain in battle, and Camilla died in a convent.—Cervantes, Don Quixote, I. iv. 5, 6 (“Fatal Curiosity,” 1605) .
Lothario, a young Genoese nobleman, “haughty, gallant, gay, and perfidious.” He seduced Calista, daughter of Sciol ́to (3 syl.) , a Genoese nobleman, and was killed in a duel by Altamont, the husband. This is the “gay Lothario,” which has become a household word for a libertine and male coquette.—N. Rowe, The Fair Penitent (1703) . ”

“ Whatever can be done by handicraft, which knows not beautiful proportions, but labors for convenience, cheerfulness, and durability, appeared united in this spot. They served him up dinner in his own room: he had time enough for meditating. Especially it struck him, that he should have got acquainted with another person of so interesting a character, who had been so closely related to Lothario. "It is just," said he to himself, "that a man so gifted should attract round him gifted women. How far the influence of manliness and dignity extends! ”

“ He finds that there is a secret society by which, unknown to himself, he has been closely watched and in some measure guided. This society, of which Lothario is one of the leading members, has been formed for the cultivation of all that is highest and noblest in humanity; and Meister, his “Lehrjahre” over, is admitted into it with much pomp and ceremony. He learns the truth about his first love, Marianne, and at the same time hears that she is dead. He then wins the affections of a woman who appeals rather to his intellect than to his feeling ”

“ Act I. Courtyard of a German inn. Chorus of townspeople and travellers. Lothario, a wandering minstrel,-582- sings, accompanying himself on his harp, "Fugitif et tremblant" (A lonely wanderer) . Filina and Laertes, on the way with their troupe to give a theatrical performance in a neighbouring castle, appear on a balcony. Mignon is sleeping on straw in the back of a gypsy cart. Giarno, chief of the gypsy band, rouses her. She refuses to dance. He threatens her with a stick. Lothario and Wilhelm protect her. Mignon divides a bouquet of wild flowers between them. ”

“ There is the rakish Lothario who neglects his own better half and devotes himself to some other man's, with a lofty disregard of appearances; and there is the coquettish little wife who treats her husband very much like a dog and very little like her lord, and who carries on her flirtations in the most audacious manner under his eyes, and apparently with his sanction. ”

“ Sometimes the young Lothario is ordered back to his regiment, or sent to Van or Trebizond or Egypt for the good of his morals, or his health or the community in which he lives. Sometimes everybody accepts the situation and the banns are called and they live happy ever after. ”

“ The original Lothario—the tragedy being first represented in 1703—was George Powell, an esteemed actor who won applause from Addison and Steele, but who appears to have been somewhat of a toper, and was generally reputed to obscure his faculties by incessant indulgence in Nantes brandy. The fourth act of the play over, the actor was impatient to be gone, and was heard behind the scenes angrily demanding the assistance of Warren, his dresser, entirely forgetful of the fact that his attendant was employed upon the stage in personating the corpse of Lothario. ”

“ He does not possess the faculty of giving living form to the thoughts and feelings of a type of mind different from his own. One of the actresses of the company, Aurelia, excites his sympathy by her settled melancholy, which is due to the fact that she has been deserted by Lothario, a lover, of high station, whom she is unable to forget. Before her death she intrusts a letter to Meister, asking him to place it, when all is over, in Lothario’s hands. ”

“ Lothario is killed by the injured husband, Sciolto goes mad with shame and rage, and Calista falls into a state of despair and penitence.
The fifth act opens with Sciolto's elaborate preparations for vengeance on his daughter. The stage directions for this scene are,—
["A room hung with black: on one side Lothario's body on a bier; on the other a table, with a skull and other bones, a book, and a lamp on it. Calista is discovered on a couch, in black, her hair hanging loose and disordered. After soft music, she rises and comes forward."] ”

“ The rest—an enormous property—went to his sister, the Countess of Bute.
From Italy he went on a long tour through the East, where he seems to have played the rôle of Lothario very effectually. At Alexandria (to give only one of his love adventures) he lost his fickle heart to the beautiful wife of the Danish Ambassador, whom, under various pretences, he induced to leave the coast clear by getting him to go to Holland. The husband thus safely out of the way, Montagu proceeded to dispose of him. ”

“ He was one of those golden youths who think that everything is made for their amusement, that women especially are but toys that may be played with for a time, and then cast aside for ever.'
"'On a particular Sunday this gay Lothario attended the Sandyriggs church. His presence there was noticed by most of the congregation; and it was particularly remarked that his eyes were upon Miss Callendar during the whole service, and that, in fact, he was completely spellbound. ”

“ He revels in describing the artifices by which he got the most unassailable of women into his power—such as the young and beautiful Madame Michelin, whose religious scruples proved such a frail barrier against the assaults of the young Lothario. ”

“ Then Lothair said: “When you have alluded to these matters before, you never spoke of them in a sanguine spirit.”
“I have seen the cause triumph,” said Theodora; “the sacred cause of truth, of justice, of national honor. I have sat at the feet of the triumvirate of the Roman Republic; men who, for virtue, and genius, and warlike skill and valor, and every quality that exalts man, were never surpassed in the olden time—no, not by the Catos and the Scipios; and I have seen the blood of my own race poured, like a rich vintage, on the victorious Roman soil ”