probably on the stair some half-tipsy artisan or slave, who is descending from the attics for another cup of fiery wine at the nearest wine-shop. We go to the theatre. The play is "Ilione," by Pacuvius; the scene a highly sensational one, where the ghost of Deiphobus, her son, appearing to Ilione, beseeches her to give his body burial. "Oh mother, mother," he cries, in tones most raucously tragic, "hear me call!" But the Kynaston of the day who plays Ilione has been soothing his maternal sorrow with too potent Falernian. He slumbers on. The populace, like the gods of our gallery, surmise the truth, and, "Oh! mother, mother, hear me call!" is bellowed from a thousand lungs. We are enjoying a comedy, when our friends the people, "the many-headed monster of the pit," begin to think it slow, and stop the performance with shouts for a show of bears or boxers. Or, hoping to hear a good play, we find the entertainment offered consists of pure spectacle, "inexplicable dumbshow and noise"-- "Whole fleets of ships in long procession pass, And captive ivory follows captive brass." (C.) A milk-white elephant or a camelopard is considered more than a substitute for character, incident, or wit. And if an actor presents himself in a dress of unusual splendour, the house is in ecstasies, and a roar of applause, loud as a tempest in the Garganian forest, or as the surges on the Tuscan strand, makes the velarium vibrate above their heads. Human nature is perpetually repeating itself. So when Pope is paraphrasing Horace, he has no occasion to alter the facts, which were the same in his pseudo, as in the real, Augustan age, but only to modernise the names:-- "Loud as the waves on Orcas' stormy steep Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep, Such is the shout, the long-applauding note, At Quin's high plume, or Oldfield's petticoat. Booth enters--hark! the universal peal. 'But has he spoken?' Not a syllable. 'What shook the stage, and made the people stare?' 'Cato's long wig, flowered gown, and lackered chair.'"