When I state that the subjects of this article are a Theatrical Green-Room, and “Behind the Scenes,” I anticipate some amount of intellectual commotion among the younger, and especially the “fast” portion, of my readers. Jaunty young clerks, and incipient men about town, dwelling in decorous country boroughs, will be apt to fancy that I am about to launch into a deliriously exciting account of those charmed regions which lie beyond the stage-door; that my talk will be altogether of spangles, muslin, skirts, and pink tights. Nay, even my young lady readers may deceive themselves with the idea that I shall draw a glowing picture of the dangerous, delightful creatures who flutter every night before theatrical audiences, and of the dear, naughty, wicked, darling marquises, earls, and baronets who lounge behind the scenes. _Helas! il n’en est rien._ I know all about green-rooms, wings, and prompt-boxes. I have been in the artistes’ _foyer_ of the Grand Opera, in the flies of her Majesty’s, and in the mezzanine floor of the Princess’s. I am not about to be cynical, but I must be prosaic, and mean to tell you, in a matter-of-fact way, what the green-room and behind the scenes of a London theatre are like at seven o’clock. It is strange, though, what a fascination these forbidden regions exercise over the uninitiated. I never knew any one yet who was actuated by an inordinate desire to visit the vestry-room of a church, or to see the cupboard where the rector and curate’s surplices are suspended on pegs, or where the sacramental wine is kept. It is but seldom that I have seen anybody who evinced a particular curiosity to see a pawnbroker’s ware-room, at the top of the spout, or to become acquainted with the arcana of a butcher’s slaughter-house (though I must confess, myself, to having once, as a schoolboy, subscribed fourpence, in company with about ten others, to see a bullock killed)—yet everybody wants to go “behind the scenes.” Some twenty months since, I had business to settle with a firm of solicitors, haughty, precise, distant, and sternly business-like, who dwelt in Bedford Row. I think that some one who was a client of the firm had a judgment against me, to which was witness one Frederick Pollock, at Westminster; but let that pass. I settled the matter, and thought myself well out of the firm and its clutches, when the penultimate junior partner, a middle-aged, respectable man, with a prematurely-bald head, asked me to dinner at Verrey’s. He was good enough to allow me to order the repast, and politely deferred to my preference for _Macon vieux_ over hot sherry; but, towards the cheese, he hinted that a man of the world, such as I seemed to be, ought never to be in difficulties (I have been hopelessly insolvent since the year ’27, in which I was born), and that he would esteem it a very great favour if I would take him “behind the scenes” some night. Yes; this man of tape and quill, of green ferret and pounce, of sheepskins and abominable