Our_ admonition, our
superior awareness, is of many things--and, among these, of how
infinitely, at the worst, they lived, the pale superseded, and how much
it was by their virtue.

Which reflections, in the train of such memories as those just gathered,
may perhaps seem over-strained--though they really to my own eyes cause
the images to multiply. Still others of these break in upon me and
refuse to be slighted; reconstituting as I practically am the history of
my fostered imagination, for whatever it may be worth, I won't pretend
to a disrespect for _any_ contributive particle. I left myself just
above staring at the Fifth Avenue poster, and I can't but linger there
while the vision it evokes insists on swarming. It was the age of the
arrangements of Dickens for the stage, vamped-up promptly on every scene
and which must have been the roughest theatrical tinkers' work, but at
two or three of which we certainly assisted. I associate them with Mr.
Brougham's temple of the art, yet am at the same time beset with the
Captain Cuttle of Dombey and Son in the form of the big Burton, who
never, I earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, so that I wander a
trifle confusedly. Isn't it he whom I remember as a monstrous Micawber,
the coarse parody of a charming creation, with the entire baldness of a
huge Easter egg and collar-points like the sails of Mediterranean
feluccas? Dire of course for all temperance in these connections was the
need to conform to the illustrations of Phiz, himself already an
improvising parodist and happy only so long as not imitated, not
literally reproduced. Strange enough the "aesthetic" of artists who could
desire but literally to reproduce. I give the whole question up,
however, I stray too in the dust, and with a positive sense of having,
in the first place, but languished at home when my betters admired Miss
Cushman--terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day
pronounce her, I fear--as the Nancy of Oliver Twist: as far away this
must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it
was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back
on us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi
and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite right; signs, of a
rueful sound to us, that the line as to our infant participation _was_
somewhere drawn. It had not been drawn, I all the more like to remember,
when, under proper protection, at Cas