and on the alert—­a few blows, ding dong, as R——­s the dramatist afterwards expressed it to me, might have done the business—­when their most exquisite moral sense was suddenly called in to assist in the mortifying negation of their own pleasure.  They could not applaud, for disappointment; they would not condemn, for morality’s sake.  The interest stood stone still; and John’s manner was not at all calculated to unpetrify it.  It was Christmas time, and the atmosphere furnished some pretext for asthmatic affections.  One began to cough—­his neighbour sympathised with him—­till a cough became epidemical.  But when, from being half-artificial in the pit, the cough got frightfully naturalised among the fictitious persons of the drama; and Antonio himself (albeit it was not set down in the stage directions) seemed more intent upon relieving his own lungs than the distresses of the author and his friends,—­then G. “first knew fear;” and mildly turning to M., intimated that he had not been aware that Mr. K. laboured under a cold; and that the performance might possibly have been postponed with advantage for some nights further—­still keeping the same serene countenance, while M. sweat like a bull.  It would be invidious to pursue the fates of this ill-starred evening.  In vain did the plot thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain the dialogue wax more passionate and stirring, and the progress of the sentiment point more and more clearly to the arduous developement which impended.  In vain the action was accelerated, while the acting stood still.  From the beginning, John had taken his stand; had wound himself up to an even tenor of stately declamation, from which no exigence of dialogue or person could make him swerve for an instant.  To dream of his rising with the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was preposterous; for from the onset he had planted himself, as upon a terrace, on an eminence vastly above the audience, and he kept that sublime level to the end.  He looked from his throne of elevated sentiment upon the under-world of spectators with a most sovran and becoming contempt.  There was excellent pathos delivered out to them:  an they would receive it, so; an they would not receive it, so.  There was no offence against decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn.  Not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard.  The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would come of it, when towards the winding up of the latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself—­for she had been coolly arguing the point of honour with him—­suddenly whips out a poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart.  The effect was, as if a murder had been committed in cold blood.  The whole house rose up in clamorous indignation demanding justice.  The feeling rose far above hisses.  I believe at that instant, if they could have got him, they would have torn the unfortunate author to pieces.  Not that the act