the history of the bogus company, from the acclamations attendant upon its illegitimate birth to the hour of disgrace when it dies by strangulation at the hands of the professional wrecker. The pale student will not be a wholly unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now made great reputations, and lawyers may surely be permitted to take a pensive interest in such matters. 'Not one except the Attorney was amused-- He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb, So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause, Knowing they must be settled by the laws.' But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their characters, like an apothecary's drugs, wear labels round their necks. Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town gull; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John Frugal, need no explanatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to have-- 'Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee, Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee'? Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee, Mr. Jeremiah Builder--Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the city, would have given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he were here to do it, we ought, I think, to confess that the humour of these typical persons who so swell the _dramatis personae_; of an Elizabethan is, to say the least of it, far to seek. There is a certain warm-hearted tradition about their very names which makes disrespect painful. It seems a churl's part not to laugh, as did our fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or impossible serving-man; but we laugh because we will, and not because we must. Genuine comedy--the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity, soul-rejoicing incongruity--has really nothing to do with types, prevailing fashions, and such-like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is not a typical fool; he _is_ a fool, seised in fee simple of his folly. Humour lies not in generalizations, but in the individual; not in his hat nor in his hose, even though the latter be 'cross-gartered'; but in the deep heart of him, in his high-flying vanities, his low-lying oddities--what we call his 'ways'--nay, in the very motions of his back as he crosses the road. These stir our laughter whilst he lives and our tears when he dies, for in mourning over him we know full well we are taking part in our own obsequies. 'But indeed,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone.'