oke, there started before
us--high-shouldered, with contracted chest, with birdlike claws, eagerly
anticipating hy their every movement the passionate words fiercely
struggling for utterance at his lips--that most villainous old tutor of
young thieves, receiver of stolen goods, and very devil incarnate: his
features distorted with rage, his penthouse eyebrows (those wonderful
eyebrows!) working like the antennae of some deadly reptile, his whole
aspect, half-vulpine, half-vulture-like, in its hungry wickedness.

Whenever _he_ spoke, again, Morris Bolter--quite as instantly, just as
visibly and as audibly--was there upon the platform. Listening to him,
though we were all of us perfectly conscious of doing, through the
Protean voice, and looking at him through the variable features of the
Novelist, we somehow saw, no longer the Novelist, but--each time Noah
Clay-pole said a word--that chuckle-headed, long-limbed, clownish,
sneaking varlet, who is the spy on Nancy, the tool of Fagin, and
the secret evil-genius of Sikes, hounding the latter on, as he does,
unwittingly, to the dreadful deed of homicide.

As for the Author's embodiment of Sikes--the burly ruffian with thews of
iron and voice of Stentor--it was only necessary to hear that infuriated
voice, and watch the appalling blows dealt by his imaginary bludgeon
in the perpetration of the crime, to realise the force, the power, the
passion, informing the creative mind of the Novelist at once in
the original conception of the character, and then, so many years
afterwards, in its equally astonishing representation.

It was in the portrayal of Nancy, however, that the genius of the
Author-Actor found the opportunity, beyond all others, for its most
signal manifestation. Only that the catastrophe was in itself, by
necessity so utterly revolting, there would have been something
exquisitely pathetic in many parts of that affecting delineation. The
character was revealed with perfect consistency throughout--from the
scene of suppressed emotion upon the steps of London Bridge, when she
is scared with the eltrich horror of her forebodings, down to her last
gasping, shrieking apostrophes, to "Bill, clear Bill," when she sinks,
blinded by blood, under the murderous blows dealt upon her upturned face
by her brutal paramour.

Then, again, the horror experienced by the assassin afterwards! So far
as it went, it was as grand a reprehension of all murderers as hand
could well have pe