never, for an instant, lost his steadfast
grasp upon sympathy and inspiration. Every heart knew the presence of a
nature that could feel all that Virginius felt and suffer and act all
that Virginius suffered and acted; and, beyond this, in his wonderful
investiture of the mad scenes with the alternate vacancy and lamentable
and forlorn anguish of a special kind of insanity, every judge of the
dramatic art recognised the governing touch of a splendid intellect,
imperial over all its resources and instruments of art.

Virginius as embodied by McCullough was a man of noble and refined
nature; lovely in life; cruelly driven into madness; victorious over
dishonour, by a deed of terrible heroism; triumphant over crime, even in
forlorn and pitiable dethronement and ruin; and, finally, released by
the celestial mercy of death. And this was shown by a poetic method so
absolute that Virginius, while made an actual man to every human heart,
was kept a hero to the universal imagination, whether of scholar or
peasant, and a white ideal of manly purity and grace to that great
faculty of taste which is the umpire and arbiter of the human mind.

The sustained poetic exaltation of that embodiment, its unity as a grand
and sympathetic personage, and its exquisite simplicity were the
qualities that gave it vitality in popular interest, and through those
it will have permanence in theatrical history. There were many subtle
beauties in it. The illimitable tenderness, back of the sweet dignity,
in the betrothal of Virginia to Icilius; the dim, transitory, evanescent
touch of presentiment, in the forecasting of the festival joys that are
to succeed the war; the self-abnegation and simple homeliness of grief
for the dead Dentatus; the alternate shock of freezing terror and cry of
joy, in the camp scene--closing with that potent repression and
thrilling outburst, "Prudence, but no patience!"--a situation and words
that call at once for splendid manliness of self-command and an ominous
and savage vehemence; the glad, saving, comforting cry to Virginia, "Is
she here?"--that cry which never failed to precipitate a gush of joyous
tears; the rapt preoccupation and the exquisite music of voice with
which he said, "I never saw thee look so like thy mother, in all my
life"; the majesty of his demeanour in the forum; the look that saw the
knife; the mute parting glance at Servia; the accents of broken reason,
but unbroken and everlasting love, that cal