He is a very different looking person now. His clothes are faultlessly cut, his hair is neatly arranged, his moustache is nicely trimmed, and his beard and whiskers have been shaved off. The strange, wild look is gone, and you see only a good-looking, well-built gentleman of five-and-thirty, who has nothing much to trouble him, unless a nice house be a trouble (it is, sometimes, I’m afraid), and who should certainly, if appearances go for anything, mix in good society and have a balance at his banker’s. That he is an actor we know from cherry-ribbons, and that accounts for there being in a little room upstairs a complete actor’s wardrobe—dresses, wigs, beards, and moustaches, and all the materials for ‘making up.’ But before he blossomed into a member of that profession which to-day takes high rank among the arts, and passes followers into the saloons of the wealthy and the great, and gives them an income for which all but the most favoured in other professions may sigh in vain, but which once only entitled its disciple to take rank as a rogue and a vagabond, what was he? An author must necessarily play the part of chorus while the action of his drama requires that he and not his characters should speak. It is not a pretty tune to which the chorus of Edward Marston’s life can be delivered. Edward Marston’s father gave his son a good education, and he gave him little else. He was a gentleman at the outset of his career, was Marston _père_, and an adventurer at the close. He dissipated a fortune in reckless extravagance, broke his wife’s heart by careless cruelty and systematic neglect, and, having brought up his son in an atmosphere of plenty, ran away from his creditors just as that son was twenty-one, and left him to shift for himself and make what he could by his brains and out of the acquaintances which he had made in his butterfly days. Given a fair start, compelled from the outset to work for his living, young Marston might have settled down into a respectable citizen. But the whole surroundings of his life had unfitted him for the steady and laborious pursuit of wealth. He had expensive habits and tastes, a love of luxury which he was accustomed to gratify without thought of the cost, and he had never been brought within the range of those high moral influences which force the inclinations under some kind of control. His home life had been unhappy. With an ailing and broken-spirited mother—a woman too weak-minded to do anything but what she did, pine away and die—with a father who openly violated the first principles of social morality, young Marston early learned to be what the world calls ‘a smart fellow.’