] caused the greatest
affliction to Sultan Amurath, forcing him to order the amputation of his
head six several times (that is, once in every one of his six parts),
during the first act. In reality, the sultan, though a decent man, was
too bloody. What by the bowstring, and what by the scimetar, he had so
thinned the population with which he commenced business, that scarcely
any of the characters remained alive at the end of act the first. Sultan
Amurath found himself in an awkward situation. Large arrears of work
remained, and hardly any body to do it but the sultan himself. In
composing act the second, the author had to proceed like Deucalion and
Pyrrha, and to create an entirely new generation. Apparently, this young
generation, that ought to have been so good, took no warning by what had
happened to their ancestors in act the first; one must conclude that
they were quite as wicked, since the poor sultan had found himself
reduced to order them all for execution in the course of this act the
second. To the brazen age had succeeded an iron age; and the prospects
were becoming sadder and sadder, as the tragedy advanced. But here the
author began to hesitate. He felt it hard to resist the instinct of
carnage. And was it right to do so? Which of the felons, whom he had cut
off prematurely, could pretend that a court of appeal would have
reversed his sentence? But the consequences were dreadful. A new set of
characters in every act, brought with it the necessity of a new plot:
for people could not succeed to the arrears of old actions, or inherit
ancient motives, like a landed estate. Five crops, in fact, must be
taken off the ground in each separate tragedy, amounting, in short, to
five tragedies involved in one.

Such, according to the rapid sketch which at this moment my memory
furnishes, was the brother, who now first laid open to me the gates of
war. The occasion was this, he had resented, with a shower of stones, an
affront offered to us by an individual boy, belonging to a
cotton-factory; for more than two years afterward, this became the
_teterrima causa_ of a skirmish, or a battle, as often as we passed the
factory; and, unfortunately, _that_ was twice a day on every day except
Sunday. Our situation in respect to the enemy was as follows: Greenhay,
a country-house newly built by my father, at that time was a clear mile
from the outskirts of Manchester; but, in after years, Manchester,
throwing out the _tentacula_