The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.
“Hamlet,” iii, 2.
True, said the knight, the ornaments of comedy ought not to be rich and real, but feigned and artificial, like the drama itself, which I would have thee respect, Sancho, and receive into favor, together with those who represent and compose it; for they are all instruments of great benefit to the commonwealth, holding, as it were, a looking-glass always before us, in which we see naturally delineated all the actions of life.
Cervantes, “Don Quixote.”
Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call our Diogenes wicked. Unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at no era of his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servant of God, than even now when doubting God’s existence.
Carlyle, “Sartor Resartus.”
I am not unmindful of the saying of an eminent Presbyterian, Dr. Norman Macleod, that many an opponent of dogma is nearer to God than many an orthodox believer; or of the words of Laertes on the dead Ophelia and the priest:
“A ministering angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling.”
W. E. Gladstone, “Religious Thought.”