The "life lessons that our innocent hero learns may sound like the tritest of homilies," Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The Times.
|
|
If you've watched Stella shorts, you're familiar: long, loose scenes of exaggerated dialogue about nothing, the actors hamming up the tritest niceties, and conversational filler.
|
|
I wish your interpretation of the show was the right one, but I feel that Game of Thrones, which started off with so much swagger, has fallen back on the tritest of political themes: that the meek shall inherit the earth.
|
|
The play is in four acts; each act begins a new and unrelated story. The first three acts borrow from popular genres, but the dialogue is often associatively poetic. Act I is a Dada infidelity play that follows two lovers, Paul and Valentine, and Valentine's husband. The Dada dialogue twists the conventions of the dramatic cliché, as in the opening lines which juxtapose the tritest of romantic dialogue with imagistic metaphor.
|
|
The Falls were commonly painted, being such an attraction to landscape artists that, writes John Howat, they were "the most popular, the most often treated, and the tritest single item of subject matter to appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American landscape painting".Howat, 69–72 Moreover, the public was captivated by the natural wonder of the Falls, considered a landmark of the North American landscape and a major tourist destination. It was the "Honeymoon Capital of the World", and prints of Niagara were given as wedding gifts. In the 1850s, Niagara was the subject of millions of stereographs, and its image could be found on wallpaper, china, and lampshades, among other consumer items.
|
|
Hazlitt then probes Lamb's distaste for the new, and affection for the past, but that only as it has "something personal and local in it." He mentions with approval Lamb's sketches of "the former inmates of the South-Sea House", his firm yet subtle sketch of the title character of the essay "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist", his portrayal of "lasting and lively emblems of human infirmity" in fictionalised sketches of his friends and family, and then, "With what a gusto Mr. Lamb describes the inns and courts of law, the temple and Gray's-Inn, as if he had been a student there for the last two hundred years", and, in general, his ability to render the life and implied history in his native city: "The streets of London are his fairy-land, teeming with wonder, with life and interest in his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of childhood: he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a bright and endless romance!"Hazlitt 1930, vol.
|
|