g stood still. From the
beginning, John had taken his stand; had wound himself up to an even
tenor of stately declamation, from which no exigence of dialogue or
person could make him swerve for an instant. To dream of his rising
with the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was preposterous;
for from the onset he had planted himself, as upon a terrace, on an
eminence vastly above the audience, and he kept that sublime level
to the end. He looked from his throne of elevated sentiment upon the
under-world of spectators with a most sovran and becoming contempt.
There was excellent pathos delivered out to them: an they would
receive it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence
against decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an
irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of
verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to
predict what would come of it, when towards the winding up of the
latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira
herself--for she had been coolly arguing the point of honour with
him--suddenly whips out a poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart.
The effect was, as if a murder had been committed in cold blood. The
whole house rose up in clamorous indignation demanding justice. The
feeling rose far above hisses. I believe at that instant, if they
could have got him, they would have torn the unfortunate author to
pieces. Not that the act itself was so exorbitant, or of a complexion
different from what they themselves would have applauded upon another
occasion in a Brutus, or an Appius--but for want of attending to
Antonio's _words_, which palpably led to the expectation of no less
dire an event, instead of being seduced by his _manner_, which
seemed to promise a sleep of a less alarming nature than it was his
cue to inflict upon Elvira, they found themselves betrayed into an
accompliceship of murder, a perfect misprision of parricide, while
they dreamed of nothing less. M., I believe, was the only person
who suffered acutely from the failure; for G. thenceforward, with
a serenity unattainable but by the true philosophy, abandoning a
precarious popularity, retired into his fast hold of speculation,--the
drama in which the world was to be his tiring room, and remote
posterity his applauding spectators at once, and actors.

ELIA.

THE OLD ACTORS

(_London Magazine_, October, 1822)

I do not know a more mort