“The wife went up to consult with him, where, in a most strange manner beholding them both in blood, wild and aghast, with the instrument at hand, readily rips herself up, and perishes on the same spot.
“The daughter, doubting the delay of their absence, searches for them all, whom she found out too soon; with the sad sight of this scene, and being overcome with horror and amaze of this deluge of destruction, she sank down and died; the fatal end of that family. The truth of which was frequently known, and flew to court in this guise; but the imprinted relation conceals their names, in favour to some neighbour of repute and kin to that family. The same sense makes me therein silent also.”—Gilbert, vol. ii. p. 100.
Mr Harris of Salisbury, in his “Philological Inquiries,” says of Lillo’s tragedy:—
“It is no small praise to this affecting fable that it so much resembles the ‘Œdipus Tyrannus’ of Sophocles. In both tragedies, that which apparently leads to joy, leads in its completion to misery; both tragedies concur in the horror of their discoveries, and both in those great outlines of a truly tragic revolution, (according to the nervous sentiment of Lillo himself,)—
‘the two extremes of life,
The highest happiness the deepest woe,
With all the sharp and bitter aggravations
Of such a vast transition.’”