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,) balks his humor, 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 neighbor sympathized with him, till a cough became epidemical.  But when, from being half artificial in the pit, the cough got frightfully naturalized 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. Kemble labored 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 development which impended.  In vain the action was accelerated, while the acting 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