The English Miscellany

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” --- Charlie Chaplin. "Dramatic comedy, from which fictional comedy is mainly descended, has been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles and character types." (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism ) "The days of Comedy are gone, alas! When Congreve's fool could vie with Moliere's bete :   Society is smooth'd to that excess,  That manners hardly differ more than dress." --- Byron "Man is the merriest species of the creation, all above and below him are serious." --- Addison “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” --- Horace Walpole. “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.” --- Peter Ustinov “The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.” --- Moliere. "In the hands of a comic genius the pretence of stupidity is the triumph of irony." "In my mind, the

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour July 13, 1798 . Extract. Once again I see            These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines                   Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,             Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke   Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!           With some uncertain notice, as might seem         Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,                Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire       The Hermit sits alone.            These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me     As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:            But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din            Of towns and cities, I have owed to them           In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,             Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;            And passing even