Yes, I am convinced that most of us have felt, rejoiced, and suffered as Arthur Pendennis did, and that we first caught the fever from the footlights. The attack may have been acute, and, in its apparent hopelessness, painful. But recovery brought with it the sweet knowledge that we had been permitted to understand the meaning of Heaven's greatest gift to mankind--Love. I know that there are many who only go to the theatre to carp and cavil, and impotently point out that if the management of the playhouse and the acting of all the parts had been placed in their hands a much better performance would have been provided; but I believe that even these would love to recall the dreamy illusions of their youth. Perhaps, in the hours of their solitude (and silence!), they do so. Why, in their soured maturity, these unhappy, self-imposed, and absolutely unconvincing critics go to the theatre to be (on their own declaration) bored and disgusted is to me a mystery. It is all the more a mystery when I know that they can thoroughly enjoy a variety hall. Of course, everything depends on the spirit in which we go to the theatre. Do you remember the difference of opinion expressed between Steerforth and David Copperfield on the night when they renewed the acquaintance of their boyhood at the Golden Cross Hotel? David had been to Covent Garden Theatre, and had there seen "Julius Cæsar." "To have," he says, "all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern task-masters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect. But the mingled reality and mystery of the whole show, the influence upon me of the poetry, the lights, the music, the company; the smooth, stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery were so dazzling, and opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out into the rainy street I felt as if I had come from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life for ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, umbrella-struggling, hackney-coach jostling, patten-clicking, muddy, miserable world." And when he told the superior Steerforth of his innocent enjoyment, he had to listen to the laughing reply:-- "My dear young Davy--you are a very daisy. The daisy of the field, at sunrise, is not fresher than you are! I have been at Covent Garden, too, and there never was a more miserable business." In my own mind I am convinced that if we will we can always, to our great advantage and delight, keep up the enthusiasm of David Copperfield;--that to some of us the theatre, even when we know all about the fret and turmoil of the actor's life together with the tricks of the stage, may from boyhood to old age remain a Palace of Fancy.