Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial papers--the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found--have attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water. The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has for years been overworking himself,--and that latterly prosperity has laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! you _shall_ make fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a rice-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out, "I am rich, I have enough, _Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios_, I will work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me down under my own fig-tree,"--Fortune dismisses him with a sneer: "Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria and _ennui_, take gout and the palsy, with you."