“The young man, whom from his long absence his parents never expected, discovers himself to an amiable friend, his long-loved Charlotte, and with her concerts the manner how to discover himself to his parents.
“It is agreed that he should go to their house, and there remain unknown till Charlotte should arrive and make the happy discovery.
“He goes thither accordingly, and having by a letter of Charlotte’s been admitted, converses, though unknown, both with father and mother, and beholds their misery with filial affection; complains, at length, he was fatigued (which, in fact, he really was), and begs he may be admitted for a while to repose. Retiring he delivers a casket to his mother, and tells her it is a deposit she must guard till he awake.
“Curiosity tempts her to open the casket, when she is dazzled with the splendour of innumerable jewels. Objects so alluring suggest bad ideas; and poverty soon gives to those ideas a sanction. Black as they are, she communicates them to her husband; who, at first reluctant, is at length persuaded, and for the sake of the jewels stabs the stranger while he sleeps.
“The fatal murder is perpetrating, or at least but barely perpetrated, when Charlotte arrives, full of joy, to inform them that the stranger within their walls was their long-lost son.
“What a discovery? What a revolution? How irresistibly are the tragic passions of terror and pity excited?”
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, where (according to the nervous sentiment of Lillo himself) we see
———— the two extremes of life,
The highest happiness and deepest woe,