I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must
acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear
a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the
groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped
for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it.

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor.
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special
observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything
so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to
nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the
very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this
overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh,
cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one
must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theater of others. Oh, there
be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that
highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of
Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted
and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made
men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

Oh, reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns speak no
more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will
themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to
laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play
be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful
ambition in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.

EXERCISES

1. 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff.

2. The first sip of love is pleasant; the second, perilous; the third,
pestilent.

3. Our ardors are ordered by our enthusiasms.

4. She's positively sick of seeing her soiled, silk, Sunday dress.

5. The rough cough and hiccough plowed me through.

6. She stood at the gate welcoming him in.

7. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.

8. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers: if Peter Piper picked
a peck of pickled peppers, where is the peck of pickled peppers that
Peter Piper picked?

9. Theo