Word: toadding
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...played by Mr. Hampden, is a good old comedy of plot and action, with characterization, minimized. Sir Giles Overreach is a stage villain without redeeming features, while his daughter (strange heredity!) is the sum of all charms. There is the attractive young lover, the afflicted hero, the fawning toad, and a host of stock comic characters brightly differentiated. When--one reads these Elizabethan comedies, one is puzzled sometimes to follow the twisted threads of plot and counterplot; but on the stage it all unfolds compactly and without confusion. The trick of deception, dramatic irony, we call it, is a favorite...
During the summer the male toads stay in the water, and their peculiar note can be frequently heard. Nearly allied to the ordinary variety, is the solitary toad, which is seldom seen because it generally remains hidden under ground during the day time and only ventures out at night...
...these represent the highest point our faculty has got in the evolution from the primitive seats of our "arboreal ancestors." They are, for the most part, cheap wooden chairs, constructed with an entire disregard of the curves and angles of the human frame, and placed behind a sort of toad-stool formed of an iron upright and a small square of black walnut. This toad-stool desk gives no opportunity for comfort in writing, as it is not large enough to support the elbow and note-book at the same time, and an ordinarily bad chirography is thrown into...