My mention above of Henry Pettitt reminds me of another writer of melodrama whom we, of the jocund years, were sometimes called upon to review. This was Paul Merrit. Paul was an enormously fat man with the absolutely hairless face of a boy. He had a high falsetto voice, and his blood-and-thunder dramas were crude, lurid, penny-plain-and-twopence-coloured productions. He had a great facility in plots and situations, and, in respect of these gifts and graces, was called in by Sir Augustus Harris to collaborate in one or two of the autumn melodramas at Drury Lane. Paul was the last man in all Europe to whom would apply the term “literary.” Yet he became a member of one or two literary clubs. On the day on which the death of Thomas Carlyle was announced, some of us were sitting in one of these institutions discussing the passing of the Sage of Chelsea. To us entered Paul Merrit. He wore the drawn and despairing expression of one who had suffered a severe personal bereavement. He had in his hand a journal containing a long obituary notice of Carlyle. Holding it towards us, he said in his high falsetto, shaken by a queer tremolo of emotion: “Well, gentlemen, _another gap in our ranks_!” The notion was too farcical. The claim of Merrit to a fellowship with Carlyle dispelled the cloud that the intelligence of the death of the author of the “Sartor Resartus” had superinduced. And, to the great surprise and disgust of poor Paul, we all burst into an incontrollable roar of laughter. Merrit eventually abandoned writing and took to farming. In that occupation, I understand, he discovered his _métier_. I mentioned a little while back that the business of dramatic criticism is conducive of longevity. When I first went professionally to the theatre stalls in 1870, until I gave up that healthy practice in 1890, I saw on first night after first night the same faces. They never appeared to be ill or tired. They never sent substitutes on important _premiers_. They never appeared to grow any older from year to year.