| [points to a herb growing down r.] Is deadly nightshade. Quick, Monk! Pluck we it!--SAV. and LUC. die just as POPE appears over ridge, followed by retinue in full cry.--POPE’S annoyance at being foiled is quickly swept away on the great wave of Shakespearean chivalry and charity that again rises in him. He gives SAV. a funeral oration similar to the one meant for him in Act IV, but even more laudatory and more stricken. Of LUC., too, he enumerates the virtues, and hints that the whole terrestrial globe shall be hollowed to receive her bones. Ends by saying: In deference to this our double sorrow | Sun shall not shine to-day nor shine to-morrow.--Sun drops quickly back behind eastern horizon, leaving a great darkness on which the Curtain slowly falls. All this might be worse, yes. The skeleton passes muster. But in the attempt to incarnate and ensanguine it I failed wretchedly. I saw that Brown was, in comparison with me, a master. Thinking I might possibly fare better in his method of work than in my own, I threw the skeleton into a cupboard, sat down, and waited to see what Savonarola and those others would do. They did absolutely nothing. I sat watching them, pen in hand, ready to record their slightest movement. Not a little finger did they raise. Yet I knew they must be alive. Brown had always told me they were quite independent of him. Absurd to suppose that by the accident of his own death they had ceased to breathe.... Now and then, overcome with weariness, I dozed at my desk, and whenever I woke I felt that these rigid creatures had been doing all sorts of wonderful things while my eyes were shut. I felt that they disliked me. I came to dislike them in return, and forbade them my room. Some of you, my readers, might have better luck with them than I. Invite them, propitiate them, watch them! The writer of the best Fifth Act sent to me shall have his work tacked on to Brown’s; and I suppose I could get him a free pass for the second night. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm