Once, travelling in the North, the manager met at a hotel a young musician who, like himself, “was on tour,” with some concert party it might be, and fell into conversation with him on their respective professions. This young man chatted freely, and imparted his ideas on music in general, and on theatre music in particular. The manager was pleased with the freshness and practical character of these views, and both went their way. Long after, when thinking of a successor to Stöpel—the old-established Lyceum conductor—he recalled this agreeable companion, who was Mr. Hamilton Clarke, and engaged him, at the handsome salary of some six hundred a year, to direct the music. He was, moreover, a composer of great distinction. His fine, picturesque overtures and incidental music to ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ and other Lyceum pieces, still linger in the memory. It is to be lamented that this connection was severed. The manager has later applied for aid to such composers as Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir A. Mackenzie, Sir Julius Benedict, Stanford, Jacobi, and Mr. German. When he was thus busy with preparations for inaugurating his new ambitious venture, he had engagements to fulfil in the country, and could only rush up to town occasionally to push on the preparations. He tells us how, having secured a new Horatio, a “modern young actor,” as he called him, whom he had never seen perform, he came up to town especially to hear him go through his part. After reading it over for him in the way he desired it to be done, Irving said, “Now you try it; I will be the Ghost.” “So he began, and what a surprise it was! As Horatio he apostrophized me in the most cool, familiar, drawing-room, conventional style possible to imagine. I was aghast, ‘No, no,’ I cried. ‘Stop, consider the situation, its thrills of horror, the supernatural!’ ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied, ‘but how am I to do it?’ ‘Can’t you understand it?’ I said; ‘try again.’ He did still the same again and again. There was nothing to be done but engage another performer.”