BELVIDERA.  Ha! look there!
[The Ghosts of Jaffier and Pierre rise together, both bloody.
My husband bloody, and his friend too!  Murder! 
Who has done this?  Speak to me, thou sad vision!
[Ghosts sink.
On these poor trembling knees, I beg it.  Vanished! 
Here they went down.  Oh!  I’ll dig, dig the den up. 
You shan’t delude me thus.  Ho!  Jaffier, Jaffier,
Peep up and give me but a look.  I have him! 
I’ve got him, father!  Oh, now I’ll smuggle him! 
My love! my dear! my blessing! help me! help me! 
They have hold on me, and drag me to the bottom. 
Nay, now they pull so hard.  Farewell. [She dies.

MAID.  She’s dead. 
Breathless and dead.

This may seem very sad stuff, but it would be unfair to judge Otway’s plays by this one extract.  “Venice Preserved” is now shelved as an acting drama, but it was formerly received with extraordinary favour, and is by no means deficient in poetic merit.  Campbell, the poet, speaks of it, in his life of Mrs. Siddons, as “a tragedy which so constantly commands the tears of audiences that it would be a work of supererogation for me to extol its tenderness.  There may be dramas where human character is depicted with subtler skill—­though Belvidera might rank among Shakespeare’s creations; and ‘Venice Preserved’ may not contain, like ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Lear,’ certain high conceptions which exceed even the power of stage representation—­but it is as full as a tragedy can be of all the pathos that is transfusable into action.”  Belvidera was one of Mrs. Siddons’s greatest characters.  Campbell notes that “until the middle of the last century the ghosts of Jaffier and Pierre used to come in upon the stage, haunting Belvidera in her last agonies, which certainly require no aggravation from spectral agency.”  The play was much condensed for presentment on the stage; but it would not appear that Belvidera’s dying speech, quoted above, was interfered with.  Boaden, in his memoir of the actress, expressly commends Mrs. Siddons’s delivery of the passage, “I’ll dig, dig the den up!” and the action which accompanied the words.

For the time ghosts had been only incidental to a performance; by-and-by they were to become the main features and attractions of stage representation.  Still they had not escaped ridicule and caricature.  Fielding, in his burlesque tragedy of “Tom Thumb,” introduced the audience to a scene between King Arthur and the ghost of Gaffer Thumb.  The king threatens to kill the ghost, and prepares to execute his threat, when the apparition kindly explains to him, “I am a ghost and am already dead.”  “Ye stars!” exclaims King Arthur, “’tis well.”