Assuming that Mrs. Bernard-Beere, as _Dora Steer_, speaks these lines, we have the counterpart of the villainously seductive Earl in _Philip Edgar_, a thankless part, which was admirably played by Mr. Hermann Vezin. This _Edgar_, having ruined and abandoned one sister, returns, after an interval of five or six years, to the scene of his former conquest, and lays siege to the heart of the other sister; confidentially informing the audience that he intends to marry _Dora_ as an atonement for the injuries he has inflicted on the luckless _Eva_. The shouts of derisive laughter with which this announcement (the culmination of absurdity), was met on the first night, led Mr. Hermann Vezin to somewhat modify his language on the following evenings, but he was still compelled to inflict on the audience the most tedious and extraordinary soliloquies touching Communism, Free-love, Agnosticism, and other wholly undramatic topics. For Tennyson had, with characteristic bigotry, chosen to assume that a Freethinker must necessarily be a villain; and with a view of generally condemning opinions distasteful to him, had burdened poor Edgar with the task of proclaiming himself at once as a seducer, a hypocrite, a liar, a coward, a Freethinker, an Agnostic, a Secularist, a Democrat--and all this in speeches of a contradictory and decidedly tiresome description. On the third representation of the drama the Marquis of Queensberry, who occupied a seat in the stalls, rose, and loudly protested against the Laureate's misrepresentation of the principles of freethought as a gross caricature, especially in regard to Edgar's sentiments about the law of marriage. He subsequently addressed a letter to _The Globe_, containing the following explanation:-- "THE PROMISE OF MAY." TO THE EDITOR OF THE GLOBE.