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An Essay on Comedy; And the Uses of the Comic Spirit
An Essay on Comedy And the Uses of the Comic Spirit Author:George Meredith General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1918 Original Publisher: C. Scribner's Sons Subjects: Comedy History / General Humor / General Literary Collections / Essays Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / Drama Performing Arts / Comedy Notes: This is a bla... more »ck and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 80 20. Dulness. To Meredith, this creature of the imagination is male. Yet compare Pope, Dunciad 1.9-16: In eldest time, ere mortals writ or read, Ere Pallas issued from the Thund'rer's head, Dulness o'er all possessed her ancient right, Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night; Fate in their dotage this fair idiot gave, Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave, Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind, She ruled, in native Anarchy, the mind. Still her old Empire to restore she tries, For, born a Goddess, Dulness never dies. And see the note to Dunciad 1.12, Pope and Warburton, 1743: 'I wonder the learned Scriblerus has omitted to advertise the reader, at the opening of this poem, that Dulness here is not to be taken contractedly for mere stupidity, but in the enlarged sense of the word, for all slowness of apprehension, shortness of sight, or imperfect sense of things.' 80 20-21. dogs on the Nile-banks. The story goes back to Aelian (Variae His- toriae 1.4): 'And that habit of the Egyptian dog is clever; for they do not carelessly and freely take one continuous drink from the river -- bending over and lapping as much as Tm-n"T -ssr 'r-kt Sff :SJ a L r . Tns SMMfe on B 12. d TkeLaten -, £. knocks you down with the butt end of it.' Boswell says the conceit is adapted from one of Gibber's comedies, but Birkbeck Hill in his edition of Boswell ...« less