n's life is to make love to servant-girls,
and they slap his face; but it does not discourage him; he seems to be
more smitten by them than ever.

The comic man is happy under any fate, and he says funny things at
funerals and when the bailiffs are in the house or the hero is waiting
to be hanged.

This sort of man is rather trying in real life. In real life such a man
would probably be slaughtered to death and buried at an early period of
his career, but on the stage they put up with him.

He is very good, is the comic man. He can't bear villainy. To thwart
villainy is his life's ambition, and in this noble object fortune backs
him up grandly. Bad people come and commit their murders and thefts
right under his nose, so that he can denounce them in the last act.

They never see him there, standing close beside them, while they are
performing these fearful crimes.

It is marvelous how short-sighted people on the stage are. We always
thought that the young lady in real life was moderately good at not
seeing folks she did not want to when they were standing straight
in front of her, but her affliction in this direction is as nothing
compared with that of her brothers and sisters on the stage.

These unfortunate people come into rooms where there are crowds of
people about--people that it is most important that they should see, and
owing to not seeing whom they get themselves into fearful trouble, and
they never notice any of them. They talk to somebody opposite, and they
can't see a third person that is standing bang between the two of them.

You might fancy they wore blinkers.

Then, again, their hearing is so terribly weak. It really ought to be
seen to. People talk and chatter at the very top of their voices close
behind them, and they never hear a word--don't know anybody's there,
even. After it has been going on for half an hour, and the people "up
stage" have made themselves hoarse with shouting, and somebody has been
boisterously murdered and all the furniture upset, then the people "down
stage" "think they hear a noise."

The comic man always rows with his wife if he is married or with his
sweetheart if he is not married. They quarrel all day long. It must be a
trying life, you would think, but they appear to like it.

How the comic man lives and supports his wife (she looks as if it wanted
something to support her, too) and family is always a mystery to us. As
we have said, he is not a rich man and he n