There are some stories so dreadful in the immensity of human misery which they reveal--there are some tragedies of which the catastrophe is one of such unmitigated horror, that the reader who has general impressions of what will be the end of the dismal tale, but who is unfamiliar with its particular circumstances, is unable to follow, without some kind of impatience, the opening scenes of the drama. He has continually in his mind’s eye the awful falling of the curtain on anguish and despair and death. Half unconsciously he hastens on in his perusal, and slurs over minor episodes and seemingly trifling facts, forgetting that these are subsidiary and auxiliary to the terrible consummation which he so anxiously awaits. “Toutes choses meuvent vers leur fin,” Rabelais has said; but the little things--the slender fibres of a story--are gathered up as it proceeds, into bundles; and, acquiring importance from consolidation, are ultimately merged in the final and tremendous whole. Thus there have been many records of human life and action, now real, now artificial, in reading which we have to encounter an almost uncontrollable impulse to turn to the end, and ascertain whether that of which we have had, at the beginning, a vague forecast, will really come to pass. Who, if he will only have the candour to acknowledge it, has not had to struggle with such an impulse in reading, say, the _Electra_ of Sophocles, the _Faust_ of Goethe, and the _Bride of Lammermoor_ of Scott?--three of the most perfectly tragic dramas, I take it, ever fashioned by the hand of mortal genius. And so it is with numerous tragedies of superhuman structure and ordinance. In both cases we pant for the last scene of all, which is to end the strange eventful history. What will be the fate of Aegisthus, and the doom of Clytemnestra? Who, if anyone, will rescue Gretchen from a shameful death? How will Edgar Ravenswood bear his immeasurable sorrow?