I may observe that this Juliet, though unmarried, was spoken of as “Mrs.” and not “Miss,” for the reason that she was old enough to _be_ the former. This was invariably the rule on our own stage a century and a half ago; and Cibber, in the ‘Lady’s Last Stake,’ calls two of his female characters _Miss_ Notable and _Mrs._ Conquest, though both are unmarried; but the former is hardly old enough to be a bride, and the latter might have had daughters of her own. Another coincidence struck me in the Irish theatre. The performances were announced as for the benefit of a certain actor _and his creditors_. I should have set this down to Irish humour, had I not remembered having read that Spiller, in 1719, had made the same announcement at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But enough of these remnants. I leave them, to portray an illustrative drama, the chief character in which was enacted by one who was great in costume; and who may therefore claim to have his story, hitherto told but to the select few, placed upon our record. THREE ACTS AND AN EPILOGUE. “My youth Pass’d through the tropics of each fortune, I Was made her perfect tennis-ball; her smiles Now made me rich and honour’d; then her frowns Dash’d all my joys, and blasted all my hopes.” _THE HUNTINGDON DIVERTISEMENT, played at Merchant Tailors’, 1678._ ACT I. “Balthazar,” said a fine-looking lad in the prison of Orléans, “you are a brute!” By way of reply to this testimonial to character, the gaoler struck the boy with his heavy bunch of keys on the head. The blow sent young Edmond staggering against the wall. He recovered himself, however, and dauntlessly repeated— “Balthazar, you are nothing better than a brute!” And Edmond Thierry was right. Balthazar was not only a brutal gaoler, but he took delight in his vocation. He had abandoned the honest calling of a “marbrier,” to take upon him the duties of guarding the victims whom Republican suspicion had consigned to captivity, and whom it destined to death. There is no doubt but that Balthazar was a brute. But brute as he was, his prisoners despised him. They endured, but they defied him. His hand might smite, but his ferocity could not subdue them. They _would_ be happy, and their determination only rendered him the more ferocious. From the old Briton gentleman, Pantin de la Guerre, to little Edmond Thierry, there was not one whom he would not daily cuff, and cuff all the harder from the conviction that they dared not, for their lives, strike again an officer of the Republic, one and indivisible.