In connection with the stage, knights have figured sometimes before, as well as behind the curtain. Of all the contests ever maintained, there was never, in its way a fiercer than that which took place between Sir William Rawlings, and young Tom Dibdin. The son of “tuneful Charlie,” born in 1771, and held at the font, as the “Lady’s Magazine” used to say, by Garrick, was not above four years of age when he played Cupid to Mrs. Siddons’ Venus, in Shakespeare’s Jubilee. It was hardly to be expected that after this and a course of attendance as choir-boy at St. Paul’s, he would settle down quietly to learn upholstery. This _was_ expected of him by his very unreasonable relatives, who bound him apprentice to the city knight, Sir William Rawlings, a then fashionable upholsterer in Moorfields. The boy was dull as the mahogany he had to polish, and the knight could never make him half so bright in business matters. “Tom Dibdin,” thus used to remark the city cavalier--“Tom Dibdin is the stupidest hound on earth!” The knight, however, changed his mind when his apprentice, grown up to man’s estate, produced “The Cabinet.” Sir William probably thought that the opera was the upholstery business set to music. But before this point was reached, dire was the struggle between the knight and the page, who would not “turn over a new leaf.” When work was over, the boy was accustomed to follow it up with a turn at the play--generally in the gallery of the Royalty Theatre. On one of these occasions the knight followed him thither, dragged him out, gave him a sound thrashing, and, next morning, brought him before that awfully squinting official, John Wilkes. The struggle ended in a drawn battle, and Tom abandoned trade: and instead of turning out patent bedsteads, turned out the “English Fleet,” and became the father of “Mother Goose.” He would have shown less of his relationship to the family of that name, had he stuck to his tools; in the latter case he might have taken his seat as Lord Mayor, in a chair made by himself, and in those stirring times he might have become as good a knight as his master. As it was, the refuse of knighthood had a hard time of it. He was actor of all work, wrote thousands of songs, which he sold as cheap as chips, and composed four pieces for Astley’s Theatre, for which he received fourteen pounds--hardly the price of a couple of arm-chairs. How he flourished and fell after this, may be seen in his biography. He had fortune within his grasp at one time, but he lost his hold when he became proprietor of a theatre. The ex-apprentice of the old knight-upholder could not furnish his own house with audiences, and the angry knight himself might have been appeased could his spirit have seen the condition into which “poor Tom” had fallen just previous to his death, some twenty years ago.