Sir Thomas was a bore of the first magnitude, and an inveterate hanger-on about cabinet-ministers and other prominent persons. He was constantly worrying Lord Burlington and Lord Burlington's servants by his Paul-pry-like presence. On calling at Burlington House, and being told that his lordship had gone out, he would desire to be let in to look at the clock or to play with a monkey which was kept in the hall, and so at length get into his lordship's room. The servants, exasperated, preconcerted a scheme to be rid of the nuisance. So, one day, as soon as the porter opened the gate and found Sir Thomas outside, he said, "His lordship is gone out, the clock has stopped, the monkey is dead."[O] MISS NEILSON. The story of _La Giulietta_ was told, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, by Luigi da Porto, a gentleman of Vicenza who had served in the army, and to whom it was narrated by one of his archers to beguile a solitary night-march. After passing through various translations the story was taken by Shakespeare as the groundwork of his wonderful tragedy, _Romeo and Juliet_, one of his earliest plays, and one of the most varied in passion and sentiment. Schlegel says of it: "It shines with the colors of the dawn of morning, but a dawn whose purple clouds already announce the thunder of a sultry day." The stormy acting of the elder Kean in _Richard III._--that epitome of ambition and bloodshed--was said to produce the effect of reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning: in _Romeo and Juliet_ the first two acts are illumined only by the soft moonlight of love, and we are not startled by the lightning of tragedy until it gleams upon the bloody blade of Tybalt in the beginning of the third act: then Love and Death join hands, and move for a time with equal step across the stage. Finally come the poisoning and self-slaughters, and in the representation the curtain falls upon a corse-strewn graveyard, where Death reigns alone. Sad contrast to the lighted ball-room where the lovers first looked into each other's eyes--to the fair garden that lay at midnight "all Danae to the stars"--to the moon-silvered balcony from which Juliet leaned in her loveliness as she exchanged with Romeo her earliest vows!