applauded.

The good stage lawyer is never by any chance a married man. (Few good
men are, so we gather from our married lady friends.) He loved in early
life the heroine's mother. That "sainted woman" (tear and nose business)
died and is now among the angels--the gentleman who did marry her, by
the bye, is not quite so sure about this latter point, but the lawyer is
fixed on the idea.

In stage literature of a frivolous nature the lawyer is a very different
individual. In comedy he is young, he possesses chambers, and he is
married (there is no doubt about this latter fact); and his wife and his
mother-in-law spend most of the day in his office and make the dull old
place quite lively for him.

He only has one client. She is a nice lady and affable, but her
antecedents are doubtful, and she seems to be no better than she ought
to be--possibly worse. But anyhow she is the sole business that the poor
fellow has--is, in fact, his only source of income, and might, one would
think, under such circumstances be accorded a welcome by his family. But
his wife and his mother-in-law, on the contrary, take a violent dislike
to her, and the lawyer has to put her in the coal-scuttle or lock her
up in the safe whenever he hears either of these female relatives of his
coming up the stairs.

We should not care to be the client of a farcical comedy stage lawyer.
Legal transactions are trying to the nerves under the most favorable
circumstances; conducted by a farcical stage lawyer, the business would
be too exciting for us.

THE ADVENTURESS.

She sits on a table and smokes a cigarette. A cigarette on the stage is
always the badge of infamy.

In real life the cigarette is usually the hall-mark of the particularly
mild and harmless individual. It is the dissipation of the Y.M.C.A.; the
innocent joy of the pure-hearted boy long ere the demoralizing influence
of our vaunted civilization has dragged him down into the depths of the
short clay.

But behind the cigarette on the stage lurks ever black-hearted villainy
and abandoned womanhood.

The adventuress is generally of foreign extraction. They do not make bad
women in England--the article is entirely of continental manufacture
and has to be imported. She speaks English with a charming little French
accent, and she makes up for this by speaking French with a good sound
English one.

She seems a smart business woman, and she would probably get on very
well if it were not