decline to pay for poems copied from the annuals of eighteen hundred and thirty-six; but to find the acme of persecution and badgering commend me to a theatrical manager. Return we to our muttons. The theatre sleeps a sound, tranquil sleep for some hundred minutes; but about six it begins to wake again to fresh life and activity. At half-past six it is wide awake and staring. The “dressers,” male and female, have arrived, and are being objurgated by incensed performers in their several _cabinets de toilette_, because they are slow in finding Mr. Lamplugh’s bagwig, or Mademoiselle Follejambe’s white satin shoes. The call-boy—that diminutive, weazened specimen of humanity, who has never, so it seems, been a boy, and never will be a man—has entered upon his functions, and already meditates a savage onslaught on the dressing-room doors, accompanied by a shrill intimation that the overture is “on.” Let us leave the ladies and gentlemen engaged in the theatre to complete the bedizenment of their apparel, and, pending their entrance into the green-room, see what that apartment itself is made of. Of course it is on a level with the stage, and within a convenient distance of that prompt-box which forms the head-quarters of the call-boy, and where he receives instructions from his adjutant-general, the prompter. In country theatres, the green-room door is often within a foot or so from the wing; and there is a facetious story told of a whilom great tragedian, who, now retired and enjoying lettered and dignified ease as a country gentleman, was, in his day, somewhat remarkable for violent ebullitions of temper. He was playing Hamlet; and in the closet scene with Gertrude, where he kills the old chamberlain, who lies in ambuscade, and just at the moment he draws his rapier, it occurred to his heated imagination that an inoffensive light comedian, ready dressed for the part of Osric, who was standing at the green-room door within reasonable sword range, was the veritable Polonius himself. Whereupon the tragedian, shrieking out, “A rat! a rat! dead, for a ducat—dead!” made a furious lunge at the unhappy Osric, who only escaped instant death by a timely hop, skip, and jump, and fled with appalling yells to a sofa, under which he buried himself. Tradition says that the tragedian’s rapier went right through the wood-work of the half-opened door; but I know that tradition is not always to be trusted, and I decline to endorse this particular one now.