e treatment of Scott's novel is marked by scrupulous fidelity,
not indeed to every detail of that noble book, but to its essential
quality and tone. The structure of the play reproduces in action
substantially the structure of the original story. The scene in which
Edgar and Lucy avow their love and pledge themselves to each other is
written with exquisite grace and profound tenderness. The picture
presented upon the stage when the lovers are parted was one of
astonishing animation. The scene of the interrupted wedding and of Lucy
Ashton's agony, distraction, and death was one of intense power and
dramatic effect. The duel of Ravenswood and Bucklaw upon the desolate,
moon-lit sands was invested with the excitement of suspense and with
weird horror. And the final exposition of dramatic contrast,--when upon
the wide, bleak beach, with the waste of vacant sea beyond and the
eastern heaven lit with the first splendour of sunrise, the old man
stooped to take up the raven's feather, the last relic of
Ravenswood--was so entirely beautiful that the best of words can but
poorly indicate its loveliness. For an audience able to look seriously
at a serious subject, and not impatient of the foreground of gloom in
which, necessarily, the story is enveloped at its beginning, this was a
perfect work. The student of drama must go back many years to find a
parallel to it, in interest of subject, in balance, in symmetry, and in
sympathetic interpretation of character.

There is a quality of Hamlet in the character of Ravenswood. He is by
nature a man of a sad mind, and under the pressure of afflicting
circumstances his sadness has become embittered. He takes life
thoughtfully and with passionate earnestness. He is a noble person,
finely sensitive and absolutely sincere, full of kindness at heart, but
touched with gloom; and his aspect and demeanour are those of pride,
trouble, self-conflict--of an individuality isolated and constrained by
dark thoughts and painful experience. That is the mood in which Henry
Irving conceived and portrayed him. You saw a picturesque figure, dark,
strange, romantic--the gravity engendered by thought and sorrow not yet
marring the bronzed face and the elastic movement of youth--and this
personality, in itself fascinating, was made all the more pictorial by
an investiture of romance, alike in the scenery and the incidents
through which it moved. Around such a figure funereal banners well might
wave, and under