iety has invented new callings, those
callings have not created new types. Stockbrokers, directors, official
liquidators, philanthropists, secretaries--not of State, but of
companies--speculative builders, are a new kind of people known to
many--indeed, playing a great part among us--but who, for all that, have
not enriched the stage with a single character. Were they to disappear
to-morrow, to be blown dancing away like the leaves before Shelley's west
wind, where in reading or playgoing would posterity encounter them? Alone
amongst the children of men, the pale student of the law, burning the
midnight oil in some one of the 'high lonely towers' recently built by
the Benchers of the Middle Temple (in the Italian taste), would, whilst
losing his youth over that interminable series, _The Law Reports_, every
now and again strike across the old track, once so noisy with the bayings
of the well-paid hounds of justice, and, pushing his way along it, trace
the history of the bogus company, from the acclamations attendant upon
its illegitimate birth to the hour of disgrace when it dies by
strangulation at the hands of the professional wrecker. The pale student
will not be a wholly unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now
made great reputations, and lawyers may surely be permitted to take a
pensive interest in such matters.

'Not one except the Attorney was amused--
He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb,
So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause,
Knowing they must be settled by the laws.'

But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters swim
out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and
Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their
characters, like an apothecary's drugs, wear labels round their necks.
Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town
gull; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John
Frugal, need no explanatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for
withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to have--

'Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee,
Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee'?

Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee, Mr.
Jeremiah Builder--Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the city, would have
given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he were here
to do it, we ought, I think, to confess that