It was a play that had been favoured with a great run.  Critics had once objected to it, that it was made to subsist on scenery, a song, and a stupid piece of cockneyism pretending to be a jest, that was really no more than a form of slapping the public on the back.  But the public likes to have its back slapped, and critics, frozen by the Medusa-head of Success, were soon taught manners.  The office of critic is now, in fact, virtually extinct; the taste for tickling and slapping is universal and imperative; classic appeals to the intellect, and passions not purely domestic, have grown obsolete.  There are captains of the legions, but no critics.  The mass is lord.

And behold our friend the sailor of the boards, whose walk is even as two meeting billows, appears upon the lonely moor, and salts that uninhabited region with nautical interjections.  Loose are his hose in one part, tight in another, and he smacks them.  It is cold; so let that be his excuse for showing the bottom of his bottle to the glittering spheres.  He takes perhaps a sturdier pull at the liquor than becomes a manifest instrument of Providence, whose services may be immediately required; but he informs us that his ship was never known not to right itself when called upon.

He is alone in the world, he tells us likewise.  If his one friend, the uplifted flask, is his enemy, why then he feels bound to treat his enemy as his friend.  This, with a pathetic allusion to his interior economy, which was applauded, and the remark “Ain’t that Christian?” which was just a trifle risky; so he secured pit and gallery at a stroke by a surpassingly shrewd blow at the bishops of our Church, who are, it can barely be contested, in foul esteem with the multitude—­none can say exactly, for what reason—­and must submit to be occasionally offered up as propitiatory sacrifices.

This good sailor was not always alone in the world.  A sweet girl, whom he describes as reaching to his kneecap, and pathetically believes still to be of the same height, once called him brother Jack.  To hear that name again from her lips, and a particular song!—­he attempts it ludicrously, yet touchingly withal.

Hark!  Is it an echo from a spirit in the frigid air?

The song trembled with a silver ring to the remotest corners of the house.

At that moment the breathless hush of the audience was flurried by hearing “Dahlia” called from the pit.

Algernon had been spying among the close-packed faces for a sight of Rhoda.  Rhoda was now standing up amid gathering hisses and outcries.  Her eyes were bent on a particular box, across which a curtain was hastily being drawn.  “My sister!” she sent out a voice of anguish, and remained with clasped hands and twisted eyebrows, looking toward that one spot, as if she would have flown to it.  She was wedged in the mass, and could not move.

The exclamation heard had belonged to brother Jack, on the stage, whose burst of fraternal surprise and rapture fell flat after it, to the disgust of numbers keenly awakened for the sentiment of this scene.