Dr. Johnson was a great reciter of all sorts of things serious or comical.

I was only a reciter of ancient inventions; and if I chanced to compose verses, they were songs of love, not secrets of philosophy."

She was not, it must be confessed, especially admirable as a verbatim et literatim "reciter."

How could they have got it fixed into their heads that she was a reciter?

But by the time the reciter had got through this unimportant dreariness, no doubt his audience had settled down to listen.

[Footnote 3: The rod or staff carried anciently by poets and reciters of poems.]

At an early age showed a remarkable talent in music; a public entertainer on the piano and reciter of his own verse.

c. In Italy they have solemn declamations of certain select young gentlemen in Florence (like those reciters in old Rome), and public theatres in most of their cities, for stage-players and others, to exercise and recreate themselves.

They were recited and listened to just as gravely at Lorenzo di Medici's table; and yet neither compromised the reciters, nor were at all associated with the enjoyment of the fare that ensued.

The lecture season was presently to end, on the last Friday in March, with a concert which was to include a series of recitations by a lady-reciter from London.

Londonderry had written to a lecture agency for the name of a likely reciter, man or woman, and they had sent him the name of Isabel Strange.

But the worthy priest checked him: "Say the reciter, my dear boy; actor is not a word for self-respecting people.

The latter version is as evidently English as the former is Scottish; or rather, each has grown to its present form as the reciters exercised their art to please an English or a Scottish audience.

At the top of the hill, on a little open space where a reciter is declaiming with vigorous gestures the verses of Saadi, the adorable Persian poet, I abandon myself to the contemplation of the Transcaucasian capital.

I could not resist so facile and moderate demand: so scribbled out another, omitting sundry things, such as the witch story, about half the forest scene (which is too leisurely for story), and transposing that damn'd soliloquy about England getting drunk, which like its reciter stupidly stood alone nothing prevenient, or antevenient, and cleared away a good deal besides ...

" I am, therefore, inclined to think these "improvisatri" are mere reciters of the great Italian poets.

They belonged to no particular author, but, like all folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and ballad reciters, who modernized their language, added to them, or corrupted them, and passed them along.

I have heard him say that the master in whose form he was, being a bad sleeper, held "first school" at four o'clock on a winter's morning; and that the boy for whom he fagged, being anxious to shine as a reciter, and finding it difficult to secure an audience, compelled him and his fellow-fag to listen night after night to his recitations, perched on a high stool where a nap was impossible.

And it leadeth the reciter from all sins, to the solar region.

[Footnote 1: The citation is from a charming letter in which Pliny (Bk. v. letter 17) tells Spurinna the pleasure he had just received from a recitation by a noble youth in the house of Calpurnius Piso, and how, when it was over, he gave the youth many kisses and praises, congratulated his mother and his brother, in whom, as the reciter tried his powers, first fear for him and then delight in him was manifest.

The reciter paused as if from exhaustion.

His attitude was one which I have seen in a common little illumination to the "Reciter," compiled by Dr. Pinches (Henry Irving's old schoolmaster).

SKALD, an old Scandinavian poet, a reciter or singer of poems in praise of the Norse warriors and their deeds.

Customers flocked to the tap of the Red Lion as they had never flocked before, unless in election-time; and good Mrs. Cobbe had to repeat the story of the conjuror's illness and death till, like many other reciters, she had told it so often that she began to forget it.

[Illustration: Kindly Hostess (to nervous reciter who has broken down in "The Charge of the Light Brigade").