after, watching the robbery of the Bath
Mail, and hearing " Hurrah for the Road!"
in Paul Clifford. It was also at Covent
Garden that I had first seen childhood's
notions of fairy-land realised, as Beauty and
the Beast, The White Cat, The Sleeping
Beauty in the Wood, and a long train of
glittering personages swept by. I had seen
the Court of Comus here, and heard Cool
deny that Charles was Sir Harcourt Courtley's
son; and had vivid recollections of the
unpleasant night that Mr. W. H. Payne
passed in the Great Bed of Ware—of the
thump he got on the back of his head from
the archway, as he bowed to his retainers, as
Guy Earl of Warwick, whilst carried into
his castle on their shoulders—of the heedless
manner in which he shut his own same head
into the Otranto helmet! Much more than
this I thought about. But my last recollection
connected with the theatre, before its
change, was seeing the old spiral staircase,
down which Aladdin wound to the enchanted
gardens, and a rat-eaten wicker-and-canvass
elephant—it was once Bluebeard's—going off
piecemeal in a waggon, having been
purchased by a country manager, when the rout
of properties took place.

I hear that the theatre is never to be
rebuilt, but that a market for poultry is to
occupy its site. Boaden reports John Kemble
to have said, on the morning after the fall of
Covent Garden the First, in eighteen
hundred and eight, " Of all this vast treasure,
nothing now remains but the arms of
England over the entrance of the theatre, and
the Roman eagle standing solitary in the
market-place."

I would have a souvenir of the late theatre
also in the market-place. It should be a
fountain, the basin supported by Norma,
Don Giovanni, Dulcamara, Valentine, Maffeo
Orsini, and Fides; and on the top I would
have a statue, suggested by the antique, of
Mario sitting amongst the ruins of Covent
Garden.

POISON.

CLEMENT THE SEVENTH, it was thought,
died of the fumes of a poisoned torch carried
before him in pontifical procession. Cleopatra
was supposed to have sent Antony his death
as a love-gift in the odour of a poisoned
flower. Scaliger says that the Turks, who
were great riders, had a subtle way of poisoning
the saddles of their private enemies,
and this was tried against a high person
in England, but without success. The seats
of chairs, gloves, letters, handkerchiefs, salves,
and perfumes, it was thought, might be
impregnated with death. Linnaeus states that
both the Emperor Henry the Fourth and a
Duke of Savoy were destroyed by the smell
of poisoned gloves. Less than a hundred
years ago, it was believed that the saliva of
an angry person is a deadly poison, and it
certainly was one of the ingredients in that
drug of which the common name told the
familiar use—succession powder.

Such fears survive only as pleasant fables,
but they once had terrible significance. When
lust and wrath were little bridled, and to
hate a man meant actively to wish him dead;
when to be checked in a career meant almost
as frequently by foul as fair means to
endeavour to remove the check; when lawlessness
was strong and law was weak; when to
give poison was easy, and to prove that it
had been administered was, in most cases,
beyond the skill of chemist or physician;
then it was that the dread of foul play rose
incessantly to warn off man from man.
"Never," said an old physician to his children,
''take choice morsels from strangers, or without
knowing whence they come. When you
are invited to a feast, if you must go, take
heed of the faith of those who bring the cup
to you."

It is to be remembered, too, that an imperfect
power of detection not only increased the
danger by allowing to the secret criminal no
slight hope of impunity, but increased the
dread by leaving men open to belief,
concerning any sudden or strange death, that it
was caused by treachery. In the middle
ages, and until at least the close of the
seventeenth century, we rarely find it chronicled
that a man died unexpectedly, except it be
with the addition of the phrase, " not without
suspicion of poison." Epidemics were ascribed
most commonly to poisoned wells; and, many
an innocent community of Jews has paid in
massacre and persecution cruel penalty for
the afflictions of their neighbours—caused by
poison, doubtless, but most commonly by
poison brewed of filth in their own dwellings.

Not only did a want of certain
knowledge aggravate dread of the subtlety of those
drugs which waste life by a slow torture or
destroy it in a sudden agony—which, having
been imbibed as welcome perfume, drank
with the wine, or eaten with the meat,
suffocate, convulse, strike with palsy,
perhaps lurk for months inactive, and then, when
the secret assassin has assured his own escape,
suddenly kill. Great as it was, the fear of
poison did not end with this. There was one
word of old for both the poisoner and sorcerer.
Because knowing too little, ready to believe
too much, physicians and philosophers then
taught the world that herbs fitly chosen,
when impregnated with forces brought down
from the stars, could be made capable of
influencing not life only, but also fortune.
By means of ointment rubbed upon the eye-
lids, any person evil-minded might increase
the force of a malignant current from the
eyes, which should pass through the eyes of
any victim, and fall as a curse upon his soul.
There were herbs that would transform men
into wolves; there were even words so
poisonous that by the utterance of them a
man's cattle could be smitten with disease,