inseparable from a theatrical direction,--the fights, the squabbles, the insufferable pretensions he must bear, the rivalries he must reconcile, the hates he must conciliate; the terrible existence of coax and bully, bully and coax, fawn, flatter, trample on, and outrage, which goes on night and day behind the curtain,--but that his whole life in the world is exactly a mild counterpart of the same terrible performance; the great people, his patrons, being fifty times more difficult to deal with than the whole corps itself,--the dictating dowagers and exacting lords, the great man who insists upon Mademoiselle So-and-so being engaged, the great lady who will have no other box than that occupied by the Russian embassy, the friends of this tenor and the partisans of that, the classic admirers of grand music, and that larger section who will have nothing but comic opera, not to mention the very extreme parties who only care for the ballet, and those who vote the “Traviata” an unclean thing. What are a lover's perjuries to the lies such a man tells all day long?--lies only to be reckoned by that machine that records the revolutions of a screw in a steamer. His whole existence is passed in promises, excuses, evasions, and explanations; always paying a small dividend to truth, he barely escapes utter bankruptcy, and by a plausibility most difficult to distrust, he obtains a kind of half- credit,--that of one who would keep his word if he could. By some strange law of compensation, this man, who sees a very dark side of human nature,--sees it in its low intrigues, unworthy pursuits, falsehoods, and depravities,--who sees even the “great” in their moods of meanness,--this man, I say, has the very keenest relish for life, and especially the life of London. He knows every capital of Europe: Paris, from the Chaussée d'Antin to the Boulevard Mont-Parnasse; Vienna, from the Hof to the Volksgarten; Rome, from the Piazza di Spagna to the Ghetto; and yet he would tell you they are nothing, all of them, to that area between Pall Mall and the upper gate of Hyde Park. He loves his clubs, his dinners, his junketings to Richmond or Greenwich, his short Sunday excursions to the country, generally to some great artiste's villa near Fulham or Chiswick, and declares to you that it is England alone offers all these in perfection. Is it any explanation, does it give any clew to this gentleman's nature, if I say that a certain aquiline character in his nose, and a peculiar dull lustre in the eye, recall that race who, with all the odds of a great majority against them, enjoy a marvellous share of this world's prosperity? Opposite to him sits one not unworthy--even from externals--of his companionship. He is a very good-looking fellow, with light brown hair, his beard and moustaches being matchless in tint and arrangement: he has got large, full blue eyes, a wide capacious forehead, and that style of head, both