The central characteristic of the genuine melodrama, now nearly or quite obsolete, was its combination of musical tone and muscular movement as a method of dramatic revelation and impression. Its theme and scene lay in the middle or lower class and in a limited sphere. Thus, while the assassination of a monarch suggested a tragedy, a village murder would form the subject of a melodrama. But all the gestures and pantomime of the performers were regulated or accompanied by instrumental music played forte or fortissimo, piano or pianissimo, as the situation required. The villain was marked by an orchestral discord or crash, while lovers billed and cooed to the mellifluous breathings of the German flute. Villagers always came over a bridge at the rise of the curtain to lively music. The heroine entered to eight bars of plaintive melody. Four harsh and strongly accented bars heralded the approach of the villain. The characters struggled to hurried music, recognized one another and were surprised to chords, and crept about in caves and dark apartments to mysterious pizzicato strains. All this correspondence of sound, color, and motion works on the souls of the audience in the profoundest manner, obscurely suggestive of innumerable things beyond the reach of any clear memory and below the depths of any distinct apprehension. It stirs up that automatic region of our nature compacted of prehistoric experiences. Few persons have any idea how closely the theatre even in its romantic extravaganzas and fairy spectacles reflects the truths of human life. It merely intensifies the effect and produces a magical impression by expanding and shrinking the measures of space and time. But all its seeming miracles are in the outer world slowly brought about in prosaic reality. The suddenness of the changes in the mimic scenes ought to open our eyes to the equal marvellousness of them in the gradual substance of history. Harlequin in his spangled vestment, with his sword of enchantment, pursuing the lovely Columbine, and always outwitting and baffling the clumsy attempts of the Clown and Pantaloon to circumvent him, is the type of how the aristocracy of genius has always snatched the sweet prizes of the world from blundering plebeianism amidst the astonishment, laughter, and rage of the bewildered bystanders, who so imperfectly comprehend the game. The relations of coexistence and sequence, the working of laws of cause and effect that preside over events in the actual world, are not altered in the theatre. It is only their measures or rates of action that are trifled with so to the amazement of the senses. Appreciating this, it is obvious that no transformation scenes on the stage can possibly equal the real ones in life itself. Mohammed, the poor factor of Kadijah, receives an inspiration, preaches a new faith, is hunted by his foes, conquers nation after nation, till a quarter of the earth exults under his crescent flag and hails him infallible prophet of Allah.