to elicit
a sound--they emitted a solitary noise without an echo--there was no
deep to answer to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be quiet.
The third act at length brought on the scene which was to warm the
piece progressively to the final flaming forth of the catastrophe. A
philosophic calm settled upon the clear brow of G. as it approached.
The lips of M. quivered. A challenge was held forth upon the stage,
and there was promise of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this
extraordinary occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed disposed to
make a ring,--when suddenly Antonio, who was the challenged, turning
the tables upon the hot challenger, Don Gusman (who by the way should
have had his sister) baulks his humour, and the pit's reasonable
expectation at the same time, with some speeches out of the
new philosophy against duelling. The audience were here fairly
caught--their courage was up, and on the alert--a few blows, _ding
dong_, as R----s the dramatist afterwards expressed it to me, might
have done the business--when their most exquisite moral sense was
suddenly called in to assist in the mortifying negation of their own
pleasure. They could not applaud, for disappointment; they would
not condemn, for morality's sake. The interest stood stone still;
and John's manner was not at all calculated to unpetrify it. It
was Christmas time, and the atmosphere furnished some pretext for
asthmatic affections. One began to cough--his neighbour sympathised
with him--till a cough became epidemical. But when, from being
half-artificial in the pit, the cough got frightfully naturalised
among the fictitious persons of the drama; and Antonio himself (albeit
it was not set down in the stage directions) seemed more intent
upon relieving his own lungs than the distresses of the author and
his friends,--then G. "first knew fear;" and mildly turning to M.,
intimated that he had not been aware that Mr. K. laboured under a
cold; and that the performance might possibly have been postponed
with advantage for some nights further--still keeping the same serene
countenance, while M. sweat like a bull. It would be invidious to
pursue the fates of this ill-starred evening. In vain did the plot
thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain the dialogue wax more
passionate and stirring, and the progress of the sentiment point more
and more clearly to the arduous developement which impended. In vain
the action was accelerated, while the actin