ions of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London
always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury.
Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and
more and more prolonged. The health of the great tragi-comedian has
gradually failed him. I have been for a long period without news from
him; but I much fear that the heyday of his health and strength is past.
The errors which made Edmund Kean, in the prime of life, a shattered
wreck, cannot be brought home to Frederick Robson. Rumors, the wildest
and the wickedest, have been circulated about him, as about every other
public man; but, to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are wholly
destitute of foundation. _Don Basilio_, in Beaumarchais's play, might
have added some very pregnant advice to his memorable counsel,
"_Calomniez, calomniez, il en resultera toujours quelque chose_." He
should have taught the world--if the world wants teaching--_how_ to
calumniate. The following recipe will be found, I think, infallible. If
your enemy be a man of studious and retired habits, hint that he has
gone mad; if you see him alone at a theatre or at church, report that he
is separated from his wife; _and in any case, declare that he drinks_.
He can't disprove it. If he drinks water out-of-doors, he may drink like
a fish at home. If he walks straight on the street, he may reel in the
parlor.

Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial
papers--the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a
curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found--have
attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from
the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water.
The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has
for years been overworking himself,--and that latterly prosperity has
laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon
them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she
frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she
equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of
flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when
Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! you
_shall_ make fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the
goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a
rice