The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous ProseLamb, Charles
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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous Prose
Lamb, Charles
English literature
[15] If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers,
I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the Galleries,
that this insult upon the morality of the common people of London
should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks. Why are
the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead of an
amusement, to be treated over and over again with the nauseous
sermon of George Barnwell? Why _at the end of their vistoes_
[_vistas_] are we to place the _gallows_? Were I an uncle, I should
not much like a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before
his eyes. It is really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it
as done upon such slight motives;--it is attributing too much to
such characters as Millwood;--it is putting things into the heads of
good young men, which they would never otherwise have dreamed of.
Uncles that think any thing of their lives, should fairly petition
the Chamberlain against it.
We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observation of life, when we should
feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day
characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own
mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very "sphere of
humanity," he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which
every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures
the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively creates
in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds,
which only waited the application of corresponding virtues in him to
return a full and clear echo of the same.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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