So completely were the playgoers of Paris subdued to what they worked in, that the makers of melodrama were emboldened to strange tricks. Théophile Gautier once described a long-forgotten melodrama by Bouchardy, himself long forgotten, in which an important character was killed off in the third act. Then in the fifth act when the unfortunate but immaculate Hero was absolutely at the mercy of his vicious enemies, and when he could extricate himself from the toils only if he had the talisman he had been seeking in vain,—the needed password, the necessary key, the missing will, the incriminatory documents, or whatever you prefer—when all is lost, even honor, then in the very nick of time, the character who was killed off in the third act, and dead beyond all question, reappears and gives the Hero the talisman (whatever it was). The Hero receives this with joy, commingled with surprize. “I thought you were dead!” he cries; “how is it that you are here now?” “Ah,” answers the traveller from beyond, “that—that is a secret that I must carry back with me into the tomb!” It is only fair to record that Parisian melodrama was not often as rude and as crude as this in its subterfuges and its expedients. Indeed, it sometimes rose to a far higher level, as in the ‘Don César de Bazan’ of Dennery and in the ‘Lyons Mail’ of Moreau, Giraudin and Delacour. It even served as the model for Victor Hugo’s superb and sonorous ‘Hernani’ and ‘Ruy Blas,’ in which he flung the rich embroidered mantle of his ample lyricism over an arbitrary skeleton of deftly articulated intrigue, as artificial as it was ingenious. In its earlier manifestations it was imitated in Great Britain, notably by Edward Fitzball, the first playmaker who perceived the theatrical possibilities of the legend of the ‘Flying Dutchman.’ Fitzball did not disdain to intimate that he considered himself the “Victor Hugo of England,”—which tempted Douglas Jerrold to remark that Fitzball was really only the “Victor No Go” of England. In its later manifestations the melodrama of the French supplied a pattern for the ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones, one of the most satisfactory specimens of this type of play. The ‘Silver King’ won the high approval of Matthew Arnold, who called it an honest melodrama, relying necessarily “for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational incidents” and none the less attaining the level of literature because the dialog and the sentiments were natural.