It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren, having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre. He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,--father and son are, alas! both dead,--and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the original _Sam Weller_ in the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,--save in one particular,--they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to hear at clubs and in critical coteries--at the Albion and the Garrick and the Cafe de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Reunion in Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to reign supreme--rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing _Macbeth_ and _Shylock_ in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody--among the bodies who were anybody--had ever heard of him before. Whence he came, or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his name was FREDERICK ROBSON.