Tis ours to rescue from the oblivious grave _Where tyrants have contrived to bury them,_ A gallant race--a nation--_and her fame; To gather up the fragments of our state, And in its cold, dismembered body, breathe The living soul of empire._ Fear God and love the king--the soldier's faith-- Was always my religion; and I know No heretics but cowards, knaves, and traitors-- _No, no, whate'er the colour of his creed, The man of honour's orthodox._ It is difficult now to discover what offence was contained in these lines, and many more such as these, which were also denounced by the Licenser. Shee expostulated--for he was not a meek sort of man by any means, and he knew the advantages of a stir to one aiming at publicity--appealed from the subordinate to the superior, from the Examiner to the Chamberlain, then the Duke of Montrose, and wrote to the newspapers; but all in vain. The tragedy could not be performed. That the stage lost much it would be rash to assert. "Alasco" was published, and those who read it--they were not many--found it certainly harmless; but not less certainly pompous and wearisome. However, that Shee was furnished with a legitimate grievance was generally agreed, although in "Blackwood's Magazine," then very intense in its Toryism, it was hinted that the dramatist, his religion and his nationality being considered, might be in league with the author of "Captain Rock," and engaged in seditious designs against the peace and Protestantism of Ireland! Some five years later, it may be noted, "Alasco" was played at the Surrey Theatre, without the slightest regard for the opinion of the Examiner of Plays, or with any change in the passages he had ordered to be expunged. Westminster was not then very well informed as to what happened in Lambeth, and probably it was not generally known that "Alasco," with all its supposed seditious utterances unsilenced, could be witnessed upon the Surrey stage. Nor is there any record that anybody was at all the worse, or the treasury of the theatre any the better, for the representation of the forbidden tragedy.