would not have dared to represent them as doing so), one cannot much
wonder that the fire of God was needed to burn up (though, alas! only
for a while) such a state of society; and that when needed the fire
fell.

The rest of the story is equally bad. Hazard next day gives Wilding
descriptions of his guilt, and while Wilding is in the height of
self-reproach at having handed over his victim to another, his wife
meets him and informs him that she herself and not Penelope has been
the victim. Now comes the crisis of the plot, the conception which
so delighted the taste of the Royal Martyr. Wilding finds himself,
as he expresses it, 'fitted with a pair of horns of his own making;'
and his rage, shame, and base attempts to patch up his own dishonour
by marrying Penelope to Hazard (even at the cost of disgorging the
half of her portion, which he had intended to embezzle) furnish
amusement to the audience to the end of the play; at last, on Hazard
and Penelope coming in married, Wilding is informed that he has been
deceived, and that his wife is unstained, having arranged with Hazard
to keep up the delusion in order to frighten him into good behaviour;
whereupon Mr. Wilding promises to be a good husband henceforth, and
the play ends.

Throughout the whole of this farrago of improbable iniquity not a
single personage has any mark of personal character, or even of any
moral quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding's case) that of patience under
injury. Hazard 'The Gamester' is chosen as the hero, for what reason
it is impossible to say; he is a mere nonentity, doing nothing which
may distinguish him from any other gamester and blackguard, save that
he is, as we are told,