, asked Chartress, reproachfully,
whether that was not _his_ work. The Colonel took off his opera-hat,
raised his hand to his eyes, and doggedly answered, "Indeed, it is!" The
Tableau thus formed, was completed by the Highwayman, the coffin, and
the defunct Curate; and the curtain fell to slow music.

Such was the plot of this remarkable dramatic work, exactly as I took it
down in the theatre, between the acts; noting also in my pocket-book
such scraps of dialogue as I have presented to the reader, while they
fell from the actors' lips. There were plenty of comic scenes in the
play which I leave unmentioned; for their humour was of the dreariest,
and their morality of the lowest order that can possibly be conceived. I
can only say, as the result of my own experience at Redruth, that if the
dramatic reforms which are now being attempted in the theatrical by-ways
of the metropolis succeed, there would be no harm in extending the
experiment as far as the locomotive stage of Cornwall. Good plays are
good missionaries; and, like missionaries, let them travel to teach.

* * * * *

And now, having seen enough of the modern drama in Cornwall, without
waiting for the songs, the dances, and the farces which are to follow
the "Curate's Daughter," let us go on to Piranzabuloe, and look at the
theatre in which the Cornish of former days assembled; endeavouring to
discover, at the same time, by what sort of performances the people were
instructed or amused some two hundred and fifty years ago.

XI.

THE ANCIENT DRAMA IN CORNWALL.

We found the modern Cornish theatre situated in a populous town; built
up, as a temporary structure, with old canvas and boards; and opened to
audiences only at night. We found the ancient Cornish theatre placed in
a perfect desert; constructed permanently, though rudely, of mounds of
turf--the sky forming its only roof, the flat plain its only stage, the
broad daylight its only means of illumination. Nothing of the kind could
be more strongly marked than the difference between the theatre of the
past, and the theatre of the present day, in the far West of England.

In like manner, the country about Piran Round (such is the name of the
Old Cornish amphitheatre) offers a startling contrast to the country
about Redruth. You are at once powerfully impressed by its barren
solitude, its dreary repose, after the fertility and populousness of the
great mining districts