Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/119

 where all is of the vilest of the vile. The favourite brother, I must tell you, is portrayed as a spendthrift, a drunkard, a gamester, and a libertine, and he is surrounded by a gang of dissolute and insolent servants and of noisy, ill-bred boon companions who are as bad as himself. Honesty, I need scarcely say, forms no part of this person's composition; he is represented as deliberately refusing to pay his tailor's bill, preferring to spend the money in a deed of so-called charity, which happened to appeal to the false sentiment which ran riot in his maudlin, ill-regulated brain. Now we come to the climax of the piece. The brother of the young spendthrift forms a plot against the honour of the woman who is, I suppose, the "heroine" of the story, and entices her to visit his rooms on an errand of no doubtful purport. And then, in full view of the audience, we have represented the attempted seduction of this foolish and thoughtless wife, whose levity of character brings her to the very brink of destruction. On the one side are all the