eports_, every now and again strike across the old
track, once so noisy with the bayings of the well-paid hounds of
justice, and, pushing his way along it, trace the history of the bogus
company, from the acclamations attendant upon its illegitimate birth
to the hour of disgrace when it dies by strangulation at the hands of
the professional wrecker. The pale student will not be a wholly
unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now made great
reputations, and lawyers may surely be permitted to take a pensive
interest in such matters.

"Not one except the Attorney was amused--
He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb,
So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause,
Knowing they must be settled by the laws."

But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters
swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont
and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their
characters, like an apothecary's drugs, wear labels round their necks.
Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town
gull; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John
Frugal, need no explanatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for
withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to
have--

"Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee,
Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee"?

Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee,
Mr. Jeremiah Builder--Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the City, would
have given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he
were here to do it, we ought, I think, to confess that the humour of
these typical persons who so swell the _dramatis personae_ of an
Elizabethan is, to say the least of it, far to seek. There is a
certain warm-hearted tradition about their very names which makes
disrespect painful. It seems a churl's part not to laugh, as did our
fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or
impossible serving-man; but we laugh because we will, and not because
we must.

Genuine comedy--the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity,
soul-rejoicing incongruity--has really nothing to do with types,
prevailing fashions, and such-like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek
is not a typical fool; he _is_ a fool, seised in fee simple of his
folly.

Humour lies not in generalizations, but in the individual; not in his
hat nor in his hose, even though th