in her lap, the cold,
blank look she had set against the world went out of them. Then, in
their mystic depths of brooding, introverted thought, new spheres of
life, rarer, brighter, fairer, seemed rounding into form and dawning
like stars.

Mrs. Margery Burleigh sat with her face turned from the stage, to
dissemble the secret impatience with which she awaited the uprolling of
the curtain, and slowly waved to and fro a huge, flowered fan, which
charged the air with a heavy Indian perfume.

At length, soft, mournful music arose from the orchestra, and every
heart stirred to the premonitory waver and lift of the curtain. Slowly
it rose, and discovered a mourning apartment, with a lady in mourning,
sitting in a mourning chair, and attended by a mourning maid. The play
was Congreve's tragedy of "The Mourning Bride," one of the best of a
class of sentimental and stiltified dramatic productions which the
public of our great-grandfathers meekly accepted,--quaffing the frothy
small-beer of rant and affectation, in lieu of deep draughts of Nature
and passion, the rich, red wine of human life, poured generously
forth by the dramatists of a better era. The excesses of fashion then
prevailing, hoops, high heels, powder, and patches, were not more
essentially absurd and artificial than such representations of high-life
and high-tragedy.

"The Mourning Bride" contains a few situations in which real passion can
have play, some fine points and poetic passages, and its moral tone is
at least respectable,--not great things to say of a famous tragedy,
certainly, but they give it an honorable distinction over many plays of
its time. There figure in it one or two characters which can be made
interesting, and even impressive, by uncommon power in the actor; though
they were usually given, at the period of which I write, in a manner
sufficiently tame to suit the dullest of courts,--likely to disturb
neither my lord in his napping nor my lady in her prim flirting.

Zara, the Captive Queen, is beyond comparison the strong character of
this play. There is a spice and fire even in her wickedness, which
make her terribly attractive, and give her a more powerful hold on the
sympathies than the decorous and dolorous Almeria, for all her virtuous
sorrows and perplexities. Zara's passion is of the true Oriental type,
leaping from the extremes of love and hate with the fierceness and
rapidity of lightning.

It is a character in which several great