nt retort that he
can make, and he has to get into a corner by himself to think of even
that.

The stage villain's career is always very easy and prosperous up to
within a minute of the end of each act. Then he gets suddenly let in,
generally by the comic man. It always happens so. Yet the villain is
always intensely surprised each time. He never seems to learn anything
from experience.

A few years ago the villain used to be blessed with a hopeful and
philosophical temperament, which enabled him to bear up under these
constantly recurring disappointments and reverses. It was "no matter,"
he would say. Crushed for the moment though he might be, his buoyant
heart never lost courage. He had a simple, child-like faith in
Providence. "A time will come," he would remark, and this idea consoled
him.

Of late, however, this trusting hopefulness of his, as expressed in the
beautiful lines we have quoted, appears to have forsaken him. We are
sorry for this. We always regarded it as one of the finest traits in his
character.

The stage villain's love for the heroine is sublime in its
steadfastness. She is a woman of lugubrious and tearful disposition,
added to which she is usually incumbered with a couple of priggish and
highly objectionable children, and what possible attraction there
is about her we ourselves can never understand; but the stage
villain--well, there, he is fairly mashed on her.

Nothing can alter his affection. She hates him and insults him to an
extent that is really unladylike. Every time he tries to explain his
devotion to her, the hero comes in and knocks him down in the middle
of it, or the comic man catches him during one or the other of his
harassing love-scenes with her, and goes off and tells the "villagers"
or the "guests," and they come round and nag him (we should think that
the villain must grow to positively dislike the comic man before the
piece is over).

Notwithstanding all this he still hankers after her and swears she shall
be his. He is not a bad-looking fellow, and from what we know of the
market, we should say there are plenty of other girls who would jump at
him; yet for the sake of settling down with this dismal young female as
his wife, he is prepared to go through a laborious and exhaustive course
of crime and to be bullied and insulted by every one he meets. His love
sustains him under it all. He robs and forges, and cheats, and lies, and
murders, and arsons. If there were any