And, even as regards the mere
order of arrangement, we might with a very decided chance of
improvement, put the scenes in a bag, give them a shake or two by
way of shuffle, and tumble them out. The whole mode of collocation-
not to speak of the feebleness of the incidents in themselves-
evinces, on the part of the author, an utter and radical want of the
adapting or constructive power which the drama so imperatively
demands.
Of the unoriginality of the thesis we have already spoken; and
now, to the unoriginality of the events by which the thesis is
developed, we need do little more than alude. What, indeed, could we
say of such incidents as the child stolen by Gipsies- as her education
as a danseuse- as her betrothal to a Gipsy- as her preference for a
gentleman- as the rumours against her purity- as her persecution by
a roue- as the irruption of the roue into her chamber- as the
consequent misunderstanding between her and her lover- as the duel- as
the defeat of the roue- as the receipt of his life from the hero- as
his boasts of success with the girl- as the ruse of the duplicate
ring- as the field, in consequence, abandoned by the lover- as the
assassination of Lara while scaling the girl's bed-chamber- as the
disconsolate peregrination of Victorian- as the equivoque scene with
Preciosa- as the offering to purchase the ring and the refusal to part
with it- as the "news from court," telling of the Gipsy's true
parentage- what could we say of all these ridiculous things, except
that we have met them, each and all, some two or three hundred times
before, and that they have formed, in a great or less degree, the
staple material of every Hop-O'My-Thumb tragedy since the flood? There
is not an incident, from the first page of "The Spanish Student" to
the last and most satisfactory, which we would not undertake to find
bodily, at ten minutes' notice, in some one of the thousand and one
comedies of intrigue attributed to Calderon and Lope de Vega.
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