raven--which the tide has washed ashore, and which is the last relic and emblem of the vanished master of Ravenswood. The tragedy is kindred, as to its spirit, with _Romeo and Juliet_, and like that representative poem of love and death it is intensely passionate, sombre, and lamentable. The first and second acts of it pass in almost unrelieved shadow. It begins with a funeral; it incorporates the ingredients of misery, madness, and death; it culminates in a fatal duel; and it ends in a picture of mortal desolation, qualified only by a mute suggestion of spiritual happiness conveyed by the pictorial emblem of the promise of immortality. It is a poetical tragedy, conceived in the spirit and written in the manner of the old masters of the poetic art. The treatment of Scott's novel is marked by scrupulous fidelity, not indeed to every detail of that noble book, but to its essential quality and tone. The structure of the play reproduces in action substantially the structure of the original story. The scene in which Edgar and Lucy avow their love and pledge themselves to each other is written with exquisite grace and profound tenderness. The picture presented upon the stage when the lovers are parted was one of astonishing animation. The scene of the interrupted wedding and of Lucy Ashton's agony, distraction, and death was one of intense power and dramatic effect. The duel of Ravenswood and Bucklaw upon the desolate, moon-lit sands was invested with the excitement of suspense and with weird horror. And the final exposition of dramatic contrast,--when upon the wide, bleak beach, with the waste of vacant sea beyond and the eastern heaven lit with the first splendour of sunrise, the old man stooped to take up the raven's feather, the last relic of Ravenswood--was so entirely beautiful that the best of words can but poorly indicate its loveliness. For an audience able to look seriously at a serious subject, and not impatient of the foreground of gloom in which, necessarily, the story is enveloped at its beginning, this was a perfect work. The student of drama must go back many years to find a parallel to it, in interest of subject, in balance, in symmetry, and in sympathetic interpretation of character.