of fresh antiquity. I will not insist upon the
art of Skelt's purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so
thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and
incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the extreme hard
favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the
villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes
themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the efforts of a
prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the other side the
impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great unity of
gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead and
buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the
ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with
cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!

The scenery of Skeltdom--or, shall we say, the kingdom of
Transpontus?--had a prevailing character. Whether it set forth Poland as
in _The Blind Boy_, or Bohemia with _The Miller and his Men_, or Italy
with _The Old Oak Chest_, still it was Transpontus. A botanist could
tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all-pervasive, running wild in
deserts; the dock was common, and the bending reed; and overshadowing
these were poplar, palm, potato tree, and _Quercus Skeltica_--brave
growths. The graves were all embowelled in the Surrey-side formation;
the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to
be sure, had yet another, an Oriental string: he held the gorgeous East
in fee; and in the new quarter of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the
Hotel des Iles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But
on these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the
Occidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. It had a strong flavour
of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and drop-scenes, and
I am bound to say was charming. How the roads wander, how the castle
sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates from behind the cloud, and how
the congregated clouds themselves uproll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is
the cottage interior, the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the
nail, the rosaries of onions, the gun and powder-horn and
corner-cupboard; here is the inn (this drama must be nautical, I foresee
Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes,
spittoons, and eight-day clock; and there again is that impressive
dungeon with the chains, which w