Taken from upper half of Plate No. 1, which is the title-page of the series, this section of which is also a guide for the setting of the first scene in the 'Miller and His Men'
It is from the covers of "the book of the words" of the 'Miller and His Men' that this enticing proclamation is taken—the 'Miller and His Men,' "adapted only for Pollock's characters and scenes," and accompanied by "7 Plates characters, 11 Scenes, 3 Wings, Total 21 Plates." The persons of the drama and the scenes wherein that drama is played out to its fiery end, are all in the bolder manner of the Old Masters, who sought the broadest effects, and who willingly neglected petty details. How bold and how broad the manner and the effects can best be judged by an honest transcription from the final page of the book of words, wherein the terse and tense dialog, single speech clashing with single speech, is accompanied by stage directions for the instruction of the Young Masters who are about to produce the sublime spectacle:
Enter Grindorf left hand, plate 4.
Enter Karl and Friberg, swords drawn, plate 4, followed by the Troops, right hand, plate 7.
Grindorf: Ha! ha! I have escaped you, have I?
Karl: But you are caught in your own trap.
Grindorf: Spiller!—Golotz! Golotz! I say!
Count: Villain! you cannot escape us now! Surrender, or instantly meet thy fate!
Grindorf: Surrender! I have sworn never to descend from this place alive!
Enter Lothair, as Spiller, 3rd dress, left hand, plate 7.
Grindorf: Spiller, let my bride appear.
Exit Lothair.
Enter Kehnar, right hand, plate 1.
Enter Ravina with torch, plate 7.
Ravina: Before it is too late, restore Claudine to her father's arms!
Grindorf: Never!
Ravina: Then I know my course!
Enter Lothair with Claudine, left hand, plate 6.
Kehnar: My child! Ah, Grindorf, spare her!
Grindorf: Hear me, Count Friberg; if you do not withdraw your followers, by my hand she dies!
Count: Never, till thou art yielded to justice!
Grindorf: No more—this to her heart!
Lothair: And this to thine!
Exit Lothair and Claudine, and Grindorf.
Re-enter Grindorf and Lothair fighting, plate 6, fight and exit.
Grindorf to be put on wounded, plate 7.
Re-enter Lothair with Claudine, plate 6.
Lothair: Ravina, fire the train!
Scene changes to explosion, Scene 11, No. 9.
The words are striking and the actions are startling, and it is no wonder that plate 7 and scene 11, No. 9, filled with joy the heart of Robert Louis Stevenson when he was a perfervid Scot of fourteen. In his manly maturity, when he had risen to an appreciation of portraits by Raeburn, and when he had sat at the feet of that inspired critic of painting, his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, he admitted that he had no desire to insist upon the art of Skelt's purveyors. "Those wonderful characters that once so thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly," he confessed regretfully; "the extreme hard favor of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes themselves, those once incomparable landscapes, seem the efforts of a prentice hand. So much of fault we can find; but, on the other side, the impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great unity of gusto; of those direct claptrap appeals which a man is dead and buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamor, the ready-made, barefaced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!"
A group of the principal characters from Pollock's juvenile drama, the 'Miller and His Men,' cut out and assembled as called for in Scene 10, a part of which is quoted in the text
II
"Transpontine" is a Briticism for which the equivalent Americanism is "Bowery." The plays which Skelt vended for the enjoyment of romantic youth were not of his own invention, nor were they the work of his hirelings; they were artfully simplified condensations of melodramas long popular in London at the theaters on the Surrey side of the Thames, and in New York at the Bowery. In French's Standard Drama, the Acting Edition, to be obtained in yellow covers for fifteen cents, one may find "the 'Miller and His Men,' a Melo-Drama in Two Acts, by F. Pocock, Esq., author of the 'Robber's Wife,' 'John of Paris,' 'Hit or Miss,' 'Magpie and the Maid,' etc., with original casts, scene and property plots, costumes, and all the stage business." And the list of properties required for the final scene helps to elucidate what may have been cryptic in the dialog quoted from the compacted adaptation of Skelt: