These people might pass three hours very well on the stage, and interest the audience hugely; but the author fails in filling up the outlines.

His language is absurdly stilted, frequently careless; the reader or spectator hears a number of loud speeches, but scarce a dozen lines that seem to belong of nature to the speakers.
Nothing can be more fulsome or loathsome to my mind than the continual sham-religious clap-traps which the author has put into the mouth of his hero; nothing more unsailor-like than his namby-pamby starlit descriptions, which my ingenious colleague has, I see, alluded to.

"Thy faith my anchor, and thine eyes my haven," cries the gallant captain to his lady.

See how loosely the sentence is constructed, like a thousand others in the book.

The captain is to cast anchor with the girl's faith in her own eyes; either image might pass by itself, but together, like the quadrupeds of Kilkenny, they devour each other.