ody-guard, chivalrous, honourable, noble, and
faithful to his bad master amid conflicting trials. _Publius
Dentatus_--(any _bould_ speaker; besides, it would be rather too much to
engage all the actors yet awhile;)--a worthy old Roman, father of the
heroine. _Galba_, the chief mover in the catastrophe, as also the opener
of its causes, an intriguing and fierce, but well-intentioned patriot,
who ultimately becomes the next emperor. With _Curtius_ a tribune,
senators, conspirators, soldiers, priests, flamens, &c. And so, after
the ungallant fashion of theatrical play-wrights, as to a class inferior
to the very &c. of masculines--(of less intention withal than one of
those &cs. of crabbed Littleton, like an old shoe fricasseed into
savourings of all things by its inimitable Coke,)--come we to the
women-kind. _Agrippina_, (one of the school of Siddons,) empress-mother,
a strong-minded, Lady-Macbeth sort of woman, and the only person in the
world who can awe her amiable son. _Lucia,_ (_you_ cannot be spared
here, clever Helen Faucit)--the heroine, secretly a Christian affianced
to Manlius; a character of martyr's daring and woman's love. _Rufa_, a
haggard old sibyl, with both private and public reasons for detesting
Nero and Nattalis: and all the fitting female attendants to conclude the
list.

Each scene, in which each act will be included, should be pictorially,
so to speak, a _tableau_ in the commencement, and a _tableau_ of
situation in the end. Let us draw up upon scene _the first_.
Back-ground, Rome burning; in front, ruins of fine Tuscan villa, still
smoking; and a terminal altar in the garden. Plebs. running to and fro,
full of conventional little speeches, with goods, parents, penates, and
other lumber, rescued from the flames; till a tribune, (hight Curtius,)
in a somewhat incendiary oration concerning poor men's calamities, and
against the powers that be, sends them to the capital with a procession
of flamines Diales and vestals, dirging solemnly a Roman hymn [some "_Ad
Capitolium, Ad Jovis solium_," and so forth] to good music. At the
end of the train come in Publius and Lucia, to whom from opposite
hurriedly walks Galba, full of talk of omens, direful doings, patriotism,
and old Rome's ruin. To these let there be added--to speak
mathematically--open-hearted Manlius; and let there follow certain
disceptatious converse about Nero, Manlius excusing him, extenuating his
vices by his temptations, giving military anec