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"But how do you like sharing the mirth of the groundlings, the filthy plebeians, and letting them see how petty are those distinctions which you value so highly, by showing them how heartily you can laugh at such distinctions yourself? Allow, my superb Coriolanus, that one purchases pride by the loss of consistency."

Surely, one catches enough in passing, in the dialogues and tableaux here, to perceive that there is something going on in this play which is not all play, something that will be earnest, perhaps, ere all is done, something which 'the groundlings' were not expected to get, perhaps, in 'their sixe-penn'orth' of it at the first performance, something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk, breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding, who could have told them what it meant.

In addition to the above types were several others, the Classical Plays, modeled upon Seneca and favored by cultivated audiences; the Melodrama, favorite of the groundlings, which depended not on plot or characters but upon a variety of striking scenes and incidents; and the Tragedy of Blood, always more or less melodramatic, like Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, which grew more blood-and-thundery in Marlowe and reached a climax of horrors in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Try to imagine Samson Agonistes put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite: and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and acting, the hero of the day.

You ought to go to purgatory and see if you could get out of there, savage!" Since some of our characters are still living and others have been lost sight of, a real epilogue is impossible. For the satisfaction of the groundlings we should gladly kill off all of them, beginning with Padre Salvi and ending with Doña Victorina, but this is not possible. Let them live!

Two shadowy forms, that were groundlings at another time, took wings and flew in a neat parabola over the windscreen, striking the metal surface of the road with a single thud. They made no effort to rise, but lay in awkward sprawling attitudes as though in the midst of violent activity they had fallen asleep.

It will not do to "tickle the ears of the groundlings" with high-sounding phrases of human progress, while he fetters their limbs with manacles of iron. There can be no such thing as a graduated despotism a stringent form of controlling the ignorant and a mild form of controlling the intelligent under one system of government.

Fashionable life is a show, truly fashionable people are the proprietors, who are never prominently or ridiculously seen therein; and these several orders of over dressed, under-fed, empty-pocketed mountebanks, are the people put on the platform outside, to astonish the eyes and ears of the groundlings. The physique of the true fashionable is peculiar and characteristic.

And now then, as to you, Good audience, groundlings, folks who love low places, You too perhaps would fain get something of me, Ere I take leave.

Back, I say! There is the first axhead! Now you, who were born a lord, be ready to lord it over these groundlings!" He whirled round on Beaumanoir, and Alec saw in his friend's hand some object, what he could not guess, while Felix carried a similar article in reserve, as it were.