It can be observed at no better place than this, that all applications for relief from these funds are known only to the respective committees, and that the names of all annuitants are kept strictly secret during their lives; that the distribution of their property is confided to gentlemen accustomed to act with the utmost delicacy and discrimination, and that some of the greatest ornaments of the English stage have been relieved in their old age, when their powers of amusing and delighting were gone,--not as poor pensioners, or objects of compassion, but as persons who, not forgetting their poor brethren in their affluence, were not themselves forgotten, when unexpected misfortune or sickness fell upon them. The unfortunate young man to whom allusion has been frequently made in the course of the last few pages, was, as may easily be imagined, one of the chief sources of Grimaldi's care and trouble in his latter days. After remaining in his house for two months in a state of madness, he grew better, left one night to attend Sadler's Wells, where he was engaged, and was seen no more until the middle of the following year, when he again presented himself in a state of insanity, and was conveyed to his own lodgings and carefully attended. The next year he was dismissed from Sadler's Wells on account of his dissolute conduct; engaged at Drury Lane with a salary of eight pounds per week, most favourably received, and discharged at the end of the first season for his profligacy and drunkenness. After this, he obtained an engagement for a month at the Pavilion in Whitechapel Road, but left that theatre also in disgrace, and fell into the lowest state of wretchedness and poverty. His dress had fallen to rags, his feet were thrust into two worn-out slippers, his face was pale with disease, and squalid with dirt and want, and he was steeped in degradation. The man who might have earned with ease, with comfort, and respectability, from six to seven hundred pounds a year, and have raised himself to far greater gains by common providence and care, was reduced to such a dreadful state of destitution and filth, that even his own parents could scarcely recognise him. He was again received, and again found a home with his sick father. At Christmas, 1829, he obtained a situation at the Coburg, through the kindness of Davidge, and there he remained until Easter, 1830, when he took the benefit of the Insolvent Debtors' Act, to relieve himself from the creditors who were hunting him down. His support in prison and contingent expenses, amounting to forty pounds, were all paid by his father. He next accepted an engagement at Edinburgh, which turned out a failure; and another at Manchester, at Christmas, 1830, by which he gained a few pounds. He then returned to the Coburg, where he might have almost permanently remained, but for his own misconduct, which once again cast him on the world.