ption, the most free of hypocrisy, in this respect, of all
the classes with whom it has ever been my fortune to forgather. Nothing
is too sharp, nothing too smart to be said; no thrust too home, no stab
too fatal; it's a melee tournament, where all tilt, and hard, knocks are
fair. This privilege of their social world, gives them a great air of
freedom in all their intercourse with strangers, and sometimes leads
even to an excess of ease, somewhat remarkable, in their manners. With
them, intimacy is like those tropical trees that spring up, twenty
feet high in a single night. They meet you at rehearsal, and before the
curtain rises in the evening, there is a sworn friendship between you.
Stage manners, and green-room talk, carry off the eccentricities which
other men dare not practise, and though you don't fancy "Mr. Tuft"
asking you for a loan of five pounds, hang it! you can't be angry with
Jeremy Diddler! This double identity, this Janus attribute, cuts in
two ways, and you find it almost impossible to place any weight on the
opinions and sentiments of people, who are always professing opinions
and sentiments, learned by heart. This may be--I'm sure it is,--very
illiberal--but I can't help it. I wouldn't let myself be moved by the
arguments of Brutus on the Corn Laws, or Cato on the Catholic question,
any more than I should fall in love with some sweet sentiment of a
day-light Ophelia or Desdemona. I reserve all my faith in stage people,
for the hours between seven and twelve at night; then, with footlights
and scenery, pasteboard banquets, and wooden waves, I'm their slave,
they may do with me as they will, but let day come, and "I'm a man
again!"

Now as all this sounds very cross-grained, the sapient reader already
suspects there may be more in it than it appears to imply, and that
Arthur O'Leary has some grudge against the Thespians, which he wishes
to pay off in generalities. I'm not bound to answer the insinuation;
neither will I tell you more of our supper at the Fox, nor why the Herr
Director Klug invited me to take a place in his wagon next day,
for Weimar, nor what Catinka whispered, as I filled her glass with
Champagne, nor how the "serpent" frowned from the end of the table; nor,
in short, one word of the whole matter, save that I settled my bill that
same night, at the Kaiser, and the next morning, left for Weimar, with a
very large, and an excessively merry party.

NOTE.

Should the Reader feel--as in