In such clouds of glory did the drama first come to me, sulphurously splendid. In the "Brit." I made my first acquaintance with the limelit humanity that, magnificent in its crimes and in its virtues, sins or suffers in false eyebrows or white muslin to the sound of soft music. Here I met that strange creation, the villain--a being as mythic, meseems, as the centaur, and, like it, more beast than man. The "Brit." was a hot place for villains, the gallery accepting none but the highest principles of speech and conduct, and ginger-beer were not too weighty a form of expressing detestation of the more comprehensive breaches of the decalogue. Hisses the villain never escaped, and I was puzzled to know how the poor actor could discriminate betwixt the hiss ethical and the hiss aesthetic. But perhaps no player ever received the latter; the house was very loyal to its favourites, all of whom had their well-defined rôles in every play, which spared the playwrights the task of indicating character. Before the heroine had come on we knew that she was young and virtuous--had she not been so for the last five and twenty years?--the comic man had not to open his mouth for us to begin to laugh; a latent sibilance foreran the villain. Least mutable of all, the hero swaggered on, virtuous without mawkishness, pugnacious without brutality. How sublime a destiny, to stand for morals and muscle to the generations of Hoxton, to incarnate the copy-book crossed with the "Sporting Times!" Were they bearable in private life, these monsters of virtue? J. B. Howe was long this paragon of men--affectionately curtailed to Jabey. Once, when the villain was about to club him, "Look out, Jabey!" cried an agonised female voice. It followed from the happy understanding on both sides of the curtain that--give ear, O envious lessees!--no play ever failed. How could it? It was always the same play. Of like kidney was the Grecian Theatre, where one went out between the acts to dance, or to see the dancing, upon a great illuminated platform. 'T was the drama brought back to its primitive origins in the Bacchic dances--the Grecian Theatre, in good sooth! How they footed it under the stars, those regiments of romping couples, giggling, flirting, munching! Alas! _Fuit Troja!_ The Grecian is "saved." Its dancing days are over, it is become the Headquarters of Salvation. But it is still gay with music, virtue triumphs on, and vice grovels at the penitent form. In such quaint wise hath the "Eagle" renewed its youth, for the Grecian began life as the Eagle, and was Satan's deadliest lure to the 'prentices of Clerkenwell and their lasses: Up and down the City Road, In and out the Eagle; That's the way the money goes! Pop goes the weasel.