[The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 by Charles Lamb]@TWC D-Link bookThe Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 CHAPTER XIII 41/165
We have gone retrograde to the noble heresy, since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed health and disease: the kindliest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis, in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and folly, valor and weakness; the servitude above freedom; the gentle mind's religion; the liberal superstition. _The Honest Whore_ .-- There is in the second part of this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the _strong lines_ against the harlot's profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded.
A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness.
But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin.
The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.
When Cervantes, with such proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry--perhaps was at some time of his life in danger of falling into those very extravagances which he ridiculed so happily in his hero! * * * * * JOHN MARSTON. _Antonio and Mellida_ .-- The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the first part of this tragedy,--where Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, banished his country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon the territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no attendants but Lucio, an old nobleman, and a page--resembles that of Lear and Kent, in that king's distresses.
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