As the eventful night approaches, the most active and
enterprising among them besiege the newspapers with elaborate puffs of
their _confrere_, a column long, and are astonished and enraged that
editors exclude them entirely, or exscissorize them to a dozen lines.
Of what importance is the foreign news, in comparison with the first
appearance of Bill Smithy in the arduous character of Hamlet? Has
Colonel Greene no sympathy with struggling genius? Or is it the result
of an infernal plot of the actors to put down competition, and sustain
a professional monopoly?

The stage-struck young gentleman has passed through the fiery ordeal
of "rehearsals," has been duly pushed and shaken into his "suit of
sables," glittering with steel bugles, his hands have been adorned
with black kids, his plumed hat rests upon his brow, his rapier
dangles at his side. The curtain goes up and he is pushed upon the
stage. His first appearance is the signal for a thundering round of
generous applause, in which his faithful fellow-Forrestians are
leading _claquers_. But the audience soon discover that he is a "guy"
escaped from the _surveillance_ an anxious mother. The stage-struck
young gentleman is "goosed." Storms of hisses or bursts of ironical
applause greet every sentence that he utters, and the curtain finally
falls on his disgrace. This generally cures the disease of which we
have been speaking. A night of agony, a week of pain, and the young
gentleman, disenchanted and disenthralled, looks back upon his
temporary mania with feelings of humiliation and surprise, cuts his
aiders and abettors, and betakes himself seriously to the rational
business of life.

But there are some stage-struck gentlemen whom nothing can convince of
their total unfitness for the stage. You may hiss them night after
night, you may present them with bouquets of carrots, and wreaths of
cabbage leaves and onions, and leather medals, and services of tin
plate; and if you find them "insensible to kindness," you may try
brickbats--but in vain. They will cling to the stage for life--living,
or rather starving, as _attaches_ to some theatre, the signal for
disturbance whenever they present themselves; detected by the lynx
eyes of the public, whether disguised as Roman citizens or Neapolitan
brigands, and severely punished for incompetency by heaped-up insult
and abuse. These men live and die miserably; yet, doubtless, their
lives are checkered with rays of hope; they rega