leled skill. The story in its
original outline is certainly interesting, and the plot is not only
skilfully developed but artfully contrived as a vehicle for stage
effect--for such merely, has the author evidently intended it; his
arrangement of the machinery, such as it is, demands warm praise for its
perspicuity and just order, and if the alarming and horrific be
legitimate objects for a dramatist, Mr. Dimond has succeeded most
marvellously.

The sorriest critic, however, knows that horror ought not to be produced
on the stage. The boundary that separates terror from horror, is the
lawful limit--the line not to be broken--the _Rubicon_ which when the
poet passes, he commits treason against the sovereign laws of the drama.
The _mighty magician of Udolpho_, as the author of the pursuits of
Literature calls Mrs. Radcliff, with powers almost beyond human, infused
into the British public a taste for the horrible which has not yet been
palled by the nauseous draughts of it, poured forth by her impotent
successors. One would think that, like Macbeth, the novel and play
reading world had by this time, supped full of horrors; but not
so--every season brings forth a new proof that that taste so far from
being extinguished, has grown to an appetite canine and ravenous which
devours with indiscriminating greediness the elegant cates of the
sumptuous, board and the offal of the shambles; provided only that they
have sufficient of the German haut-gout of the marvellous and horrible.

"_Plot--plot--plot_," says an enlightened British critic, "have been Mr.
Dimond's three studies." But what shall be said of the characters. To
any one who frequents the theatre, the characters of Longueville,
L'Eclair, Gaspard, Rosabelle, and perhaps more, are quite familiar. They
are among the worn out slippers of the modern dramatists. The character
of Bertrand is a moral novelty on the stage, and not less unnatural than
novel. Unnatural, not because he repents with a remorse truly horrible,
but because, while filled with that remorse, he submits to be a murderer
and a villian rather than violate an _oath_ he had made to perpetrate
any crime Longueville should command. This unfortunate wretch is kept in
torments through the whole play, and after having by an act of bold and
resolute virtue expiated his crimes and brought about the happy
catastrophe of the piece, is left to sneak off unrewarded. As to
Florian, though obviously intended for the hero o