“Why, he might have made his fortune at Common Garden; but that’s a long story. Poor fellow! he’s broke down now, anyhow. But she takes care of him, little darling: God bless thee!” and the Cobbler here exchanged a smile and a nod with the little girl, whose face brightened when she saw him amidst the crowd. “By the brush and pallet of Raphael!” cried the elder of the young men, “before I am many hours older I must have that child’s head!” “Her head, man!” cried the Cobbler, aghast. “In my sketch-book. You are a poet,--I a painter. You know the little girl?” “Don’t I! She and her grandfather lodge with me; her grandfather,--that’s Waife,--marvellous man! But they ill-uses him; and if it warn’t for her, he’d starve. He fed them all once: he can feed them no longer; he’d starve. That’s the world: they use up a genus, and when it falls on the road, push on; that’s what Joe Spruce calls a-progressing. But there’s the drum! they’re a-going to act; won’t you look in, gents?” “Of course,” cried Lionel,--“of course. And, hark ye, Vance, we’ll toss up which shall be the first to take that little girl’s head.” “Murderer in either sense of the word!” said Vance, with a smile that would have become Correggio if a tyro had offered to toss up which should be the first to paint a cherub. CHAPTER II. The historian takes a view of the British stage as represented by the irregular drama, the regular having (ere the date of the events to which this narrative is restricted) disappeared from the vestiges of creation. They entered the little theatre, and the Cobbler with them; but the last retired modestly to the threepenny row. The young gentlemen were favoured with reserved seats, price one shilling. “Very dear,” murmured Vance, as he carefully buttoned the pocket to which he restored a purse woven from links of steel, after the fashion of chain mail. Ah, Messieurs and Confreres the Dramatic Authors, do not flatter yourselves that we are about to give you a complacent triumph over the Grand Melodrame of “The Remorseless Baron and the Bandit’s Child.” We grant it was horrible rubbish, regarded in an aesthetic point of view, but it was mighty effective in the theatrical. Nobody yawned; you did not even hear a cough, nor the cry of that omnipresent baby, who is always sure to set up an unappeasable wail in the midmost interest of a classical five-act piece, represented for the first time on the metropolitan boards. Here the story rushed on, _per fas aut nefas_, and the audience went with it. Certes, some man who understood the stage must have put the incidents together, and then left it to each illiterate histrio to find the words,--words, my dear confreres, signify so little in an acting play. The movement is the thing. Grand secret! Analyze, practise it, and restore to grateful stars that lost Pleiad the British Acting Drama.