Well, then,--picture him to yourself, reader, a small, delicate youth, with fair, prominent features,--long, thin hair,--keen, eager, large, blue eyes, glancing out from right to left, as he walks the streets of Babylon,--and seizing with a quick impulsiveness every feeling of the hour. Still young,--and very young,--he has married for love. He is living in a cottage or villakin on the outskirts of town, where there is just a peep of green to keep one's feelings fresh; and he is writing for the stage. It is hard work, and sometimes the dun is at the door, and contact is inevitable with men who don't understand the precious jewel he weareth in his head;--but the week's hard work is got through somehow; and on Sundays he sallies forth for rural air with a little knot of friends, and the talk is of art, and letters, and the world. So quick and keen a nature as his had immense buoyancy in it. Nay, for the very dun young Douglas had an epigram,--as bright, but not as welcome, as a sovereign. A saying of those early days has found its way into a comedy,--but not the less belongs to his authentic biography. A threatening attorney shakes his fist at the villakin where at the window the wit is parleying with him. "I'll put a man in the house, Sir!" "Couldn't you," says Douglas, (and of course the right-minded reader is shocked,) "couldn't you make it a woman?" What a scandalous way to treat a man of business! Between Douglas and the lawyers, for many years, there was open war. He was a kind of Robin Hood to these representatives of the Crown,--adopting the plucky and defiant gaiety of the old outlaw, and shooting keen arrows at them with a bow that never grew weak.