You've seen one suck an orange in the street;
And when he's feasted, fling the rind away?
So will a man, who has despoiled a woman,—
When all's ta'en from her, cast her in the dirt."
Hayley was angry enough when the public damned his "Eudora," which act he thought, manifested only the bad taste of the public, seeing that his play had received the sanction of Lieutenant-General Burgoyne; but if Hayley knew little of practical triumphs of temper, and exhibited small discretion in printing his rejected tragedy, he at least showed that his tragedy was free from such nonsense as we find in Mr. Masterton's.
The two authors who most strongly contrast with each other as to their feelings under a disagreeable verdict, were Charles Lamb and Godwin. The former was present on the night that his farce, "Mr. H.," was played, and he heartily joined in the shower of hisses with which it was assailed by the audience. This was in juster taste than the conduct of Godwin, who sat in the pit, stoically indifferent, in all appearance, to the indifference of the audience to his tragedy—"Antonio." As the act-drop descended, without applause or disapprobation, the author grimly observed that such was exactly the effect he had laboured to produce. And as the piece proceeded amid similar demonstrations of contemptuous indifference, "I would not for the world," said poor Godwin, "have the excitement set in too early."
I question, however, if anything superior to "Antonio" was produced between 1800 and the first appearance of Edmund Kean. Soon after that event came Sheil, Maturin, Proctor, and a greater than any of them, Sheridan Knowles. Sheil wrote his tragedy, "Adelaide," expressly for Miss O'Neill; everything was sacrificed to one character,—and "Adelaide" proved a failure. The poem, however, contained promise of a poet. There was originality, at least there was no servile imitation, in the style, which was not indeed without inflation, and thundering phrases and conceits,—but there was, withal, a weakness, from which, if the writer ever extricated himself, it was only to fall into greater defect. The story is romantic, and something after the fashion of the day, in which there was an apotheosis for every romantic villain. Such a villain is Lunenberg, who, as he remarks in an early part of the play, had lured Adelaide's unsuspecting innocence,—
"And with a semblance of religious rites,
Abused thy trust, and plunged thee into shame."
This sorry rascal treats the lady so ill that she is driven to take poison, and Lunenberg, after fighting her brother Albert, and heroically running on his sword, dies with sentimental phrases in his mouth of pure and hallowed happiness to come, and with the prophecy that "when the sound of heaven shall raise the dead," he and Adelaide would "awake in one another's arms," which is a very bold image, to say the least of it.