his well-filled
waistcoat, and his glossy ringlets,--for, though verging on forty, he
has them still "curly,"--you'd scarcely imagine it possible that
his life was passed amongst more toil, confusion, difficulty, and
distraction than would suffice to kill five out of any twenty, and
render the other fifteen deranged. I do not mean alone the worries
inseparable from a theatrical direction,--the fights, the squabbles, the
insufferable pretensions he must bear, the rivalries he must reconcile,
the hates he must conciliate; the terrible existence of coax and bully,
bully and coax, fawn, flatter, trample on, and outrage, which goes on
night and day behind the curtain,--but that his whole life in the world
is exactly a mild counterpart of the same terrible performance; the
great people, his patrons, being fifty times more difficult to deal with
than the whole corps itself,--the dictating dowagers and exacting lords,
the great man who insists upon Mademoiselle So-and-so being engaged, the
great lady who will have no other box than that occupied by the Russian
embassy, the friends of this tenor and the partisans of that, the
classic admirers of grand music, and that larger section who will have
nothing but comic opera, not to mention the very extreme parties who
only care for the ballet, and those who vote the "Traviata" an unclean
thing. What are a lover's perjuries to the lies such a man tells all
day long?--lies only to be reckoned by that machine that records the
revolutions of a screw in a steamer. His whole existence is passed in
promises, excuses, evasions, and explanations; always paying a small
dividend to truth, he barely escapes utter bankruptcy, and by
a plausibility most difficult to distrust, he obtains a kind of
half-credit,--that of one who would keep his word if he could.

By some strange law of compensation, this man, who sees a very dark
side of human nature,--sees it in its low intrigues, unworthy pursuits,
falsehoods, and depravities,--who sees even the "great" in their moods
of meanness,--this man, I say, has the very keenest relish for life, and
especially the life of London. He knows every capital of Europe: Paris,
from the Chaussee d'Antin to the Boulevard Mont-Parnasse; Vienna, from
the Hof to the Volksgarten; Rome, from the Piazza di Spagna to the
Ghetto; and yet he would tell you they are nothing, all of them, to that
area between Pall Mall and the upper gate of Hyde Park. He loves his
clubs, his din