Nor is the list of characters of “The Sea Captain” to be despised. The outlines of all of them are good. A mother, for whom one feels a proper tragic mixture of hatred and pity; a gallant single-hearted son, whom she disdains, and who conquers her at last by his noble conduct; a dashing haughty Tybalt of a brother; a wicked poor cousin, a pretty maid, and a fierce buccaneer. These people might pass three hours very well on the stage, and interest the audience hugely; but the author fails in filling up the outlines. His language is absurdly stilted, frequently careless; the reader or spectator hears a number of loud speeches, but scarce a dozen lines that seem to belong of nature to the speakers. Nothing can be more fulsome or loathsome to my mind than the continual sham-religious clap-traps which the author has put into the mouth of his hero; nothing more unsailor-like than his namby-pamby starlit descriptions, which my ingenious colleague has, I see, alluded to. “Thy faith my anchor, and thine eyes my haven,” cries the gallant captain to his lady. See how loosely the sentence is constructed, like a thousand others in the book. The captain is to cast anchor with the girl's faith in her own eyes; either image might pass by itself, but together, like the quadrupeds of Kilkenny, they devour each other. The captain tells his lieutenant to BID HIS BARK VEER ROUND to a point in the harbor. Was ever such language? My lady gives Sir Maurice a thousand pounds to WAFT him (her son) to some distant shore. Nonsense, sheer nonsense; and what is worse, affected nonsense! Look at the comedy of the poor cousin. “There is a great deal of game on the estate--partridges, hares, wild-geese, snipes, and plovers (SMACKING HIS LIPS)--besides a magnificent preserve of sparrows, which I can sell TO THE LITTLE BLACKGUARDS in the streets at a penny a hundred. But I am very poor--a very poor old knight!” Is this wit or nature? It is a kind of sham wit; it reads as if it were wit, but it is not. What poor, poor stuff, about the little blackguard boys! what flimsy ecstasies and silly “smacking of lips” about the plovers. Is this the man who writes for the next age? O fie! Here is another joke:-- “Sir Maurice. Mice! zounds, how can I Keep mice! I can't afford it! They were starved To death an age ago. The last was found Come Christmas three years, stretched beside a bone In that same larder, so consumed and worn By pious fast, 'twas awful to behold it! I canonized its corpse in spirits of wine, And set it in the porch--a solemn warning To thieves and beggars!”