open. The house had been darkened, and as the clear, quiet, unforced
tone of Rip, yielding, not remonstrating, to the doom that we all knew
and he did not, fell upon the hushed audience, the eyes of men and
women were full of tears; while the orchestra murmured, _mezzo voce_,
during the storm within and without the house, the tenderly pathetic
melody of the "Lorelei:"

"I know not what it presages,
This heart with sadness fraught;
'Tis a tale of the olden ages
That will not from my thought."

It was not easy to find in the emotion of that moment a response to
Portia's accusation of gross immorality. There was but a poetic figure
in the mind--the sweet-natured, weak-willed, simple-hearted vagabond
of the village and the mountain--touching the heart with pity, and, in
the drunken scene, with sorrow. This figure excludes all the rest. Its
symmetry and charm are the triumph of the play as acted. Now the
immorality can not lie in the kindly feeling for the tippling
vagabond, for that is natural and universal. Indeed, the same kind of
weakness that leads to a habit of tippling belongs often to the most
charming and attractive natures, and the representation of the fact
upon the stage is not in itself immoral. The immorality must be found,
if anywhere, as Portia insisted, in the charm with which vice is
invested.

But is it so invested in this play? It used to be urged against
Bulwer's early novels that they made scoundrels fascinating, and that
boys after reading them would prefer rascals to honest men. If that
had been the fact, the novels would have been justly open to that