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The Sentimentalists

Chapter 12: ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
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About This Book

The unfinished comedy is set in a Surrey garden and stages a satiric contest of courtship and sentiment among relatives, suitors, and talkative friends. A pontificating professor advances a theory of the devoted widow while an exacting uncle polices his niece Astraea's enforced sanctity and admirers like Arden press their suit. Comic figures—a teasing wife, sympathetic companions, and gossiping ladies—reveal tensions between public oratory and private desire, teasing out the contradictions of fashionable sentimentalities about marriage, widowhood, and moral display through witty scenes and argumentative exchanges.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A great oration may be a sedative
A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle
Above Nature, I tell him, or, we shall be very much below
As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos
Back from the altar to discover that she has chained herself
Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite
Excess of a merit is a capital offence in morality
His idea of marriage is, the taking of the woman into custody
I am a discordant instrument I do not readily vibrate
I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to breathe
I who respect the state of marriage by refusing
Love and war have been compared—Both require strategy
Peace, I do pray, for the husband-haunted wife
Period of his life a man becomes too voraciously constant
Pitiful conceit in men
Rejoicing they have in their common agreement
Self-worship, which is often self-distrust
Suspects all young men and most young women
Their idol pitched before them on the floor
Were I chained, For liberty I would sell liberty
Woman descending from her ideal to the gross reality of man
Your devotion craves an enormous exchange

[The End]