her_ standing before him--"how dare you, Madam,
withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your theatrical duties?" "I
was hissed, Sir." "And you have the presumption to decide upon the
taste of the town?" "I don't know that, Sir, but I will never stand
to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence--when gathering
up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and
expostulatory indignation--in a lesson never to have been lost upon a
creature less forward than she who stood before him--his words were
these: "They have hissed _me_."

'Twas the identical argument _a fortiori_, which the son of Peleus
uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his
destiny with a good grace. "I too am mortal." And it is to be believed
that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its application, for want
of a proper understanding with the faculties of the respective
recipients.

"Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was courteously conducting
me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and
recess, of his every-day waning grandeur.

Those who knew Elliston, will know the _manner_ in which he pronounced
the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud
day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which
I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful
partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort
of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare,
observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner.
"I too never eat but one thing at dinner"--was his reply--then after
a pause--"reckoning fish as nothing." The manner was all. It was as
if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all
the savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving
Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was
_greatness_, tempered with considerate _tenderness_ to the feelings of
his scanty but welcoming entertainer.

_Great_ wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and _not
lessened_ in thy death, if report speak truly, which says that
thou didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose under no
inscription but one of pure _Latinity_. Classical was thy bringing
up! and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting
the man with the boy, took thee back in thy latest exercise
of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of The