Quote of the Day (Richard Brinsley Sheridan, With a Comic Lesson in Tragedy)

“I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of "of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere." —Anglo-Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic: Or, a Tragedy Rehearsed: A Farce (1779)

(Portrait of Sheridan by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1788-1789)