tyro had offered to toss up which
should be the first to paint a cherub.

CHAPTER II.

The historian takes a view of the British stage as represented by
the irregular drama, the regular having (ere the date of the events
to which this narrative is restricted) disappeared from the vestiges
of creation.

They entered the little theatre, and the Cobbler with them; but the
last retired modestly to the threepenny row. The young gentlemen were
favoured with reserved seats, price one shilling. "Very dear," murmured
Vance, as he carefully buttoned the pocket to which he restored a
purse woven from links of steel, after the fashion of chain mail. Ah,
Messieurs and Confreres the Dramatic Authors, do not flatter yourselves
that we are about to give you a complacent triumph over the Grand
Melodrame of "The Remorseless Baron and the Bandit's Child." We grant it
was horrible rubbish, regarded in an aesthetic point of view, but it was
mighty effective in the theatrical. Nobody yawned; you did not even hear
a cough, nor the cry of that omnipresent baby, who is always sure to set
up an unappeasable wail in the midmost interest of a classical five-act
piece, represented for the first time on the metropolitan boards. Here
the story rushed on, _per fas aut nefas_, and the audience went with it.
Certes, some man who understood the stage must have put the incidents
together, and then left it to each illiterate histrio to find the
words,--words, my dear confreres, signify so little in an acting play.
The movement is the thing. Grand secret! Analyze, practise it, and
restore to grateful stars that lost Pleiad the British Acting Drama.

Of course the Bandit was an ill-used and most estimable man. He had some
mysterious rights to the Estate and Castle of the Remorseless Baron.
That titled usurper, therefore, did all in his power to hunt the Bandit
out in his fastnesses and bring him to a bloody end. Here the interest
centred itself in the Bandit's child, who, we need not say, was the
little girl in the wreath and spangles, styled in the playbill "Miss
Juliet Araminta Wife," and the incidents consisted in her various
devices to foil the pursuit of the Baron and save her father. Some of
these incidents were indebted to the Comic Muse, and kept the audience
in a broad laugh. Her arch playfulness here was exquisite. With what
vivacity she duped the High Sheriff, who had the commands of his king
to take the Bandit alive or dead,