THESPIAN • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Thespian

"Thespian" Quotes from Famous Books

... between Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth to attend a matinee offering by his less gifted brothers. Once during the lifetime of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff and remains to go through with that most difficult exercise of Thespian muscles—the audible contact of the palm of one hand against the ...

— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... so many words, to PLAY at a great variety of professions; and then the book is all about tools, and there is nothing that delights a child so much. Hammers and saws belong to a province of life that positively calls for imitation. The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are successively simulated to the running burthen "On a cold and frosty morning," gives a good instance of the artistic taste in children. And this need for overt action and lay figures testifies to a defect in the child's imagination which ...

— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... which you so clapt, go now, and wring You Britaines brave; for done are Shakespeares dayes : His dayes are done, that made the dainty Playes, Which made the Globe of heav'n and earth to ring. Dry'de is that veine, dry'd is the Thespian Spring, Turn'd all to teares, and Phoebus clouds his rayes : That corp's, that coffin now besticke those bayes, Which crown'd him Poet first, then Poets King. If Tragedies might any Prologue have, ...

— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... No, "Thespian," it is no longer considered correct to wear a straw hat with a fur coat. Why not run the lawnmower ...

— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various

... adventitious aid, He ne'er ten pounds a week had made; Yet every Thespian brother Is now kept down, or put to flight, While he gets fifty pounds a night, ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... so result is a [Page 30] compliment alike to the self-restraint of the people and to the sway that artistic ideals held over their minds, but, above all, to a peculiar system of discipline wisely adapted to the necessities of human nature. It does not seem likely that a Thespian band of our own race would have held their passions under equal check if surrounded by the same temptations and given the same opportunities as these Polynesians. It may well be doubted if the bare authority of the kumu would have sufficed ...

— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... scenes of British industry. Otherwise the audience of the Cat and Fiddle, we mean the Temple of the Muses, were fain to be content with four Bohemian brothers, or an equal number of Swiss sisters. The most popular amusements however were the "Thespian recitations:" by amateurs, or novices who wished to become professional. They tried their metal on an audience which ...

— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... oddities who figure here. The strange-looking personage in the right-hand corner is usually called Dick Solus, from his almost invariably appearing abroad by himself, or dangling after the steps of some fair Thespian, to the single of whom he is a very constant tormentor. Mrs. Egan of the theatre, 'who knows what's what,' has christened him Mr. Dillytouch; while the heroes of the sock and buskin as invariably describe him by the appellation of Shake, from an unpleasant action ...

— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... advancing culture; the producer becomes stationary with his means of production. The itinerant smith of the southern Slav countries and the Westphalian iron works, the pack-horses of the Middle Ages and the great warehouses of our cities, the Thespian carts and the resident theater mark the starting and the terminal points of this evolution. In the second place, the modern machinery of transportation has in a far higher degree facilitated the transport of goods than of persons. The distribution ...

— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

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