of the human heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his enormous humor.
“Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!” She laughed. “The fat rascal! Imagine a man keeping the time!”
And, carefully: “It was the custom of the time,’Gene. As a matter of fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries you see how much purer he is than they are.” But she avoided a word, a line, here and there. The slightly spotty Swan—muddied a little by custom. Then, too, the Bible.
The smoky candle-ends of time. Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai: Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor McTavish (D.D.) of Presbyterian College.
“And observe, Eugene,” she said, “he never made vice attractive.”
“Why didn’t he?” he asked. “There’s Falstaff.”
“Yes,” she replied, “and you know what happened to him, don’t you?”
“Why,” he considered, “he died!”
“You see, don’t you?” she concluded, with triumphant warning.
I see, don’t I? The wages of sin. What, by the way, are the wages of virtue? The good die young.
Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! I really feel so blue! I was given to crime, And cut off in my prime When only eighty-two.
“Then, note,” she said, “how none of his characters stand still. You can see them grow, from first to last. No one is the same at the end as he was in the beginning.”
In the beginning was the word. I am Alpha and Omega. The growth of Lear. He grew old and mad. There’s growth for you.
This tin-currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses at college, and in her reading. They were—are, perhaps, still— part of the glib jargon of pedants. But they did her
