in the inevitable
belt and boots of the melodramatic highwayman. The play represents
certain startling passages in the career of one Claude Duval,
formerly a running footman, afterwards--strange anomaly!--a robber on
horseback, distinguished for polite manners and bold riding.

This remarkable person has a wife, devoted to him of course. In the
English drama all wives are good; in the French all are bad, and
people tell you that a play is the reflection of real life. Besides
this dutiful spouse, he cherishes an attachment for a young lady
of high birth and aristocratic (stage) manners. She returns his
tenderness, as it is extremely natural a young person so educated and
brought up would return that of a criminal, who has made an impression
on her heart by shooting her servants, rifling her trunks, and forcing
her to dance a minuet with him on a deserted heath under a harvest
moon.

This improbable incident affords a favourite scene, in which
Dorothea's whole soul is absorbed, and to which Jim devotes an earnest
attention, as of one who weighs the verisimilitude of an illustration,
that he may accept the purport of the parable it conveys.

Dead servants (in profusion), struggling horses, the coach upset, and
the harvest moon, are depicted in the back scene, which represents
besides an illimitable heath, and a gibbet in the middle distance: all
this under a glare of light, as indeed it might well be, for the moon
is quite as large as the hind wheel of the coach.

In the foreground are grouped, the hero himself, a comic servant with
a red nose and a fiddle, an open trunk, and a young lady in travelling
costume, viz. white satin shoes, paste diamonds, ball-dress, and
lace veil. The tips of her fingers rest in the gloved hand of her
assailant, whose voice comes deep and mellow through the velvet mask
he wears.

"My preservier!" says the lady, a little inconsequentially, while
her fingers are lifted to the mask and saluted with such a smack as
elicits a "hooray!" from some disrespectful urchin at the back of the
pit.

"To presurrve beauty from the jeer of insult, the grasp of vie-olence
is my duty and my prowfession. To adore it is my ree-ligion--and my
fate!" replies the gallant highwayman, contriving with some address
to retain his hold of the lady's hand, though encumbered by spurs, a
sword, pistols, a mask, and an enormous three-cornered hat.

"And this man is proscribed, hunted, in danger, in disgrace!" exclaim