Sketches of the History of Literature and Learning in England (Volume 3-4); With Specimens of the Principal Writers (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: it moves forward through its gradual development, and onwards to the catastrophe, in a sufficiently bustling, lively manner; and some of the situations, though the humour is rather farcical than comic, are very cleverly conceived and managed. The language also may be said to be, on the whole, racy and characteristic, if not very polished. A few lines from a speech of one of the widow's handmaidens, Tibet Talkapace, in a conversation with her fellow-servants on the approaching marriage of their masters, may be quoted as a specimen: ? I hearde our nourse speake of an husband to-day Ready for our mistresse, a rich man and a gay: And we shall go in our Frenche hoodes every day, In our silke cassocks (I warrant you) freshe aod gay; In onr tricke ferdigews and billiments of golde, Brave in our sutes of chaunge seven double folde. Then shall ye see Tibet, sires, treade the mosse so trimme; Nay, why sayd I treade ? ye shall see her glide and swimme, Not lumperdee, clumperdee, like our Spaniel Rig. GAMMER COTTON'S NEEDLE. Ralph Roister Doister is in every way a very superior production to Gammer Gurton's Needle, which, before the discovery of Udall's -piece, had the credit of being the first regular English comedy. At the same time it must be admitted that the superior antiquity assigned to Ralph Roister Doister is not very conclusively made out. All that we know with certainty with regard to the date of the play is, that it was in existence in 1551. The oldest edition of Gammer Gurton's Needle is dated 1575: but how long the play may have been composed before that year is uncertain. The title-page ofthe 575 edition describes it as played on the stage not long ago inChrist's College in Cambridge; and Warton, on the authority of a manuscript memorandum by Oldys, the emin...