Word: beggar
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...writer of prominence is always asked about himself and his work, and attacking the popular newspaper legend that pictures him as a noisy apostle of poetical jazz. He explains his love for Egypt; his admiration for Poe; his forbears; his reason for going on the road, a new beggar-troubadour, trading his rhymes for bread: "I was told by the Babbits on every hand I must quit being an artist or beg. So I said: 'I will beg!' ... It was an act of spiritual...
...Beggar's Opera', and the common question, whether it was pernicious in its effects; having been introduced...
...Beggar's Opera" took London by surprise and fifty years later it was still a favorite theme for polite dispute. The occasion on which Johnson coined this mouth-filling dictum is memorable for another reason; -- the attentive Boswell for once disagreed with his master's defense of the play, and declared "the gaiety and heroines of a highwayman very captivating to a youthful imagination", and a temptation which "it requires a cool and strong judgment to resist". Boswell was not alone in his brave opposition; no loss a figure than Edmund Burke "thought the literary merit of "The Beggar...
...century and a half has not been sufficient to answer this academic question. Last week at New Haven, that baptismal font of good plays and evil, the revived "Beggar's Opera" came for a "one-night stand" after winning London for three years, and the whole of this country during an extensive tour. But New Haven, accustomed to passing independent judgment, was inclined to be inhospitable. Professor John Million Berdan, of Yale and Early Tudor fame, took the double role of Burke and Boswell, calling the Play banal and immoral. A good citizeness of the town, alarmed by these aspersions...
Perhaps the University is depraved beyond redemption. Yale has recently undertaken a Temperance Movement. At any rate, the redoubtable Doctor must be called in once again: "The Beggar's Opera' is an excellent example of how literary tastes differ...