nothing could be said to
it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his
_great_ style.

But was he less _great_, (be witness, O ye Powers of Equanimity,
that supported in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and
more recently transmuted for a more illustrious exile the barren
constableship of Elba into an image of Imperial France), when, in
melancholy after-years, again, much near the same spot, I met him,
when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his dominion was
curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of the
small Olympic, _his Elba?_ He still played nightly upon the boards
of Drury, but in parts alas! allotted to him, not magnificently
distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and
magnificently sinking the sense of fallen _material_ grandeur in
the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more
lofty _intellectual_ pretensions, "Have you heard" (his customary
exordium)--"have you heard," said he, "how they treat me? they put me
in _comedy_." Thought I--but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal
interruption--"where could they have put you better?" Then, after a
pause--"Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio,"--and so
again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses.

O, it was a rich scene,--but Sir A---- C----, the best of
story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as
well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it--that I was
witness to, in the tarnished room (that had once been green) of that
same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury,
he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest heaven;"
himself "Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, while before
him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment--how shall
I describe her?--one of those little tawdry things that flirt at
the tails of choruses--a probationer for the town, in either of its
senses--the pertest little drab--a dirty fringe and appendage of the
lamps' smoke--who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a
"highly respectable" audience, had precipitately quitted her station
on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust.

"And how dare you," said her Manager--assuming a censorial severity
which would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed
that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices--I verily
believe, he thought _