Those who only know the Parthenon in its present days--when it occasionally remains shut for months, to open for a few nights with "Herr Eselkopfs celebrated impersonation of the 'Jew whom Shakespeare drew,'" _vide_ public advertisement and, published criticism from _Berwick-on-Tweed Argus_; when it alternates between opera and burlesque or tragedy and breakdowns, but is always dirty, and dingy, and mouldy-smelling, and bankrupt-looking--can have little idea of what it was in the days of which we are writing, when Mr. and Mrs. Momus were its lessees, and when there was more fun to be found within its walls than in any other place in London, even of treble its size. The chiefs of that merry company are both dead; the belles whose bright eyes enthralled us then are portly matrons now, renewing their former beauty in their daughters; the walking gentlemen have walked off entirely or lapsed into heavy fathers; and the authors, who were constantly lounging in the greenroom, and convulsing actors and actresses with their audacious chaff, are some dead, and all who are left sobered and steadied and aged. But all were young, and jolly, and witty, and daring in those days; and foremost amongst them was Mr. Rupert Robinson, who was then just beginning to write burlesques in a style which his successors have spoiled and written out, and was dramatising popular nursery stories, and filling them with the jokes, allusions, and parodies of the day. Although Mr. Rupert Robinson had been for some time domiciled under the same roof as Mademoiselle Anatole, he had made no attempt to cultivate the acquaintance of that lady, who was in truth a very long, very thin, very flat, very melancholy person, who had not merely _les larmes dans sa voix_, but seemed to be thoroughly saturated with misery. But soon after Mademoiselle Clarisse was added to the firm, the "littery gent," as Mrs. Mogg the landlady was accustomed to call her second-floor lodger, contrived to get up a bowing acquaintance, which soon ripened into speaking, and afterwards into much greater intimacy. Mademoiselle Anatole at first disapproved of the _camaraderie_ thus established; but she was mollified by the judicious presentation of unlimited orders for the theatres and the opera, and by other kindness which had more satisfactory and more enduring results; for Mr. Rupert Robinson, being of a convivial nature, was in the habit of frequently giving what he called "jolly little suppers" to certain select ladies of the _corps de ballet_ of the Parthenon; cheery little meals, where the male portion of the company was contributed by the Household Brigade, the Legislature, the Bar, and the Press, and where the comestibles were the succulent oyster opened in the room and eaten fresh from the operating knife, the creamy lobster, and hot potato handed from the block-tin repository presided over by a peripatetic provider known to the guests as "Tatur Khan." In his early youth Rupert had been a medical student