this,
will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?

The Olympic arose "like a phoenix from its ashes." To use language
less poetical, a wealthy tradesman--a cheesemonger, I think--found the
capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and
almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as
evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was
in the old or the new Olympic--but I think it was in the new one--that
the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager.
He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious
manner. He was a man about town, a _viveur_, a dandy; and it turned out
one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe
Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and
that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was
tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being
a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his
defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts
was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor
wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing
criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was
troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens;
and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged
himself in the jail.

It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that
Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very
clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering
Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play
the part of _Jem Baggs_, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player,
who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air
hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson,
who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a
very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the
ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by
singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and
the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills,
considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in
the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish