Act ii. sc. 2. Mammon's speech:—
“I will have all my beds blown up; not stuft:
Down is too hard.”
Thus the air-cushions, though perhaps only lately brought into use, were invented in idea in the seventeenth century!
“Catiline's Conspiracy.”
A fondness for judging one work by comparison with others, perhaps altogether of a different class, argues a vulgar taste. Yet it is chiefly on this principle that the Catiline has been rated so low. Take it and Sejanus, as compositions of a particular kind, namely, as a mode of relating great historical events in the liveliest and most interesting manner, and I cannot help wishing that we had whole volumes of such plays. We might as rationally expect the excitement of the Vicar of Wakefield from Goldsmith's History of England, as that of Lear, Othello, &c., from the Sejanus or Catiline.
Act i. sc. 4.—
“Cat. Sirrah, what ail you?
(He spies one of his boys not answer.)