He is a dog of the Newfoundland breed, for whose honesty I
would be bail to any amount; but whose intellectual qualities in
association with dramatic fiction I cannot rate high. Indeed, he is too
honest for the profession he has entered. Being at a town in Yorkshire
last summer, and seeing him posted in the bill of the night, I attended
the performance. His first scene was eminently successful; but, as it
occupied a second in its representation (and five lines in the bill), it
scarcely afforded ground for a cool and deliberate judgment of his
powers. He had merely to bark, run on, and jump through an inn window,
after a comic fugitive. The next scene of importance to the fable was a
little marred in its interest by his over-anxiety; forasmuch as while
his master (a belated soldier in a den of robbers on a tempestuous
night) was feelingly lamenting the absence of his faithful dog, and
laying great stress on the fact that he was thirty leagues away, the
faithful dog was barking furiously in the prompter's box, and clearly
choking himself against his collar. But it was in his greatest scene of
all that his honesty got the better of him. He had to enter a dense and
trackless forest, on the trail of the murderer, and there to fly at the
murderer when he found him resting at the foot of a tree, with his
victim bound ready for slaughter.
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