Jefferson's half-brother, Charles Burke, had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in it, was playing in it when he died.

After his Trenchard, Jefferson turned himself loose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous burlesque, which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of the feminine horse marines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah Isaacs Menken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head.
Then he produced a version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a more ambitious flight.

These, however, were but the avant-couriers of the immortal Rip.
Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of Irving's legend.

When the vagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep Gretchen is dead.

The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed at a table in front of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after Derrick Van Beekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies.