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that it reduced the audience to silence. “Immortal Heaven, what is man?” he exclaimed in an unnaturally loud voice. “A being with the ignorance, but not the instinct, of the feeblest animal!”
    “This is Nugent,” Bysshe murmured. “Very accomplished actor.”
    The figure then turned to the audience, and removed his hood. There was an involuntary exclamation of surprise, or dismay, at his pale and sunken features—emaciated, ravaged, and tremulous.
    “The cosmetic artists have been busy,” Bysshe said.
    Yet I scarcely heeded him. There was something so woeful, so awful, about this figure that he commanded my attention. “There is an oak beside the froth-clad pool where in old time, as I have often heard, a woman desperate, a wretch like me, ended her woes. Her woes were not like mine. And mine will never end.” He seemed to be looking around the auditorium, searching out every face and every eye, and I had a most irrational fear that he would find mine! “I have committed the great angelic sin—pride and intellectual glorying. Now I am doomed to wander. Melmoth has become Cain, outcast upon the face of the earth!” I had no notion, then, of why these words so powerfully affected me. “The secret of my destiny rests with myself. If all that fear has invented, and incredulity believe of me to be true, to what does it amount? That if my crimes have exceeded those of mortality, so will my punishment. I have been on earth a terror—”
    Someone called out “Liverpool!,” then prime minister, and the people around me broke into laughter.
    Nugent seemed for a moment startled but, with his hand upon his breast and his gaze directed towards the scene of distant mountains, he waited for the uproar to subside. Then he was Melmoth once more. “I go cursing, and to curse. I go conquering, and to conquer.” I had never before witnessed the art of personation at close quarters, and I was astonished at the apparent ease with which Nugent had assumed the identity of Melmoth; he was the more vivid for being two people, himself and the desperate man. It was as if he had acquired twice the power of any single human being. “I go condemned by every human heart, yet untouched by one human hand. There is the ruin.” He pointed with trembling hand at the pile of rocks on the side of the stage. “And there beyond it is the chapel where I will marry my chosen bride.”
    I was struck by the acting and the spectacle rather than the plot. I had never before seen so large a stage or so lavish a production, and I had scarcely become habituated to the particular brightness of the gas lamps. The effect of the intense shadows, the richness of the colours, and the symmetry of the composition upon the stage, combined to form an image more real than reality itself. I was reminded of the book of illuminations that was kept in the sacristy of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford; it could be seen on presenting a letter from a fellow of the college, and I had spent a delightful morning in turning over the pages of blue and gold, decorated with the burnished images of saints and devils. So it was at Drury Lane that evening. This was like no mountainous region in my own country, but a wonderfully heightened vision of barrendesolation. There were some real stones and gravel, as far as I could tell, but I noticed that the larger rocks were made out of stretched canvas that had been painted grey and blue. The stream that ran behind was no stream of water, but a long strip of silver paper that was being agitated by unseen hands.
    It was the end of the first act. The little orchestra struck up a melody, as Bysshe put his arm around my shoulders. “This is the true thing,” he said with great animation. “This is the full sublime!” I said nothing. “The outcast—the wanderer over the face of the earth—there we all tread! Only the exile has a tongue of fire! The imagination can form a thousand different men and worlds. It is the creator. It is