who may have been similarly maimed
in the service of their country. Not stopping
here, I have placed every man upon my free-list,
who was in the gallant company of the
four hundred and twentieth African brigade,
who fought so nobly in the last, but three, of
our glorious Kaffir wars. Nor do I stop,
even here; but once a year I have a grand
lottery; when every member of the audience
is presented with tickets in proportion to the
parts of the house they occupy; the holder
of the lucky number being entitled to a magnificent
prize. What is this prize ? Not a
vulgar, common-place distribution of sweet-meats,
or copies of a new song, which has
been sung by a young lady (her first appearance
upon any stage); nor the gift of several
free passages to Australia, reducing the great
life-long undertaking of emigration to a game
of pitch and toss; not the prize of a tea-service,
or a silver punch-bowl, these things
being reserved in the property-room for testimonials
which are periodically presented to
me in public by my grateful and delighted
actors; not the prize of a richly-bound and
illustrated volume of Shakespeare, which
everybody would affect to admire, but which
no one would come to receive; not any of
these very usual and very obvious prizes do
I provide for my annual lottery audience
but the gift of one presentation for a boy to
that public institution which is vulgarly
known as the blue-coat school. I find no
more difficulty in purchasing this privilege in
the open market, than in buying a share
in a railway; and although the price is
something considerable (about two hundred
pounds) it would be cheap to me at double
the money for the excitement it causes in
the public mind, and the highly respectable
character which it gives to the Gloriosa
Theatre.

If the day should ever come (which I never
expect) when my popularity will begin to
wane; when my judicious management will
fail in its usual beneficial effect; when my
treasury will be insolvent, and my benches
as empty as a nature-abhorred vacuum, I
have still one great card left to play, which
doubt not will raise the fallen fortunes of my
house. I would become a martyr, a victim
an opponent, from conscientious scruples, of
the detestable licenser of plays. Three pieces
should be performed in a single night, no
one of which had paid the regulation fee—
not one of which had received the regulation
sanction of the regulation official; I would be
unmoved in my determination; I would no
pay, apologise, or allow any inspection of the
manuscripts; I would stalk into a law court
I would rot in a loathsome dungeon, taking
my stand upon the great free principles of
unlicensed speaking and printing. The country
would be aroused, the whole press would
be in my favour, the whole rotten governmental
supervisional system would fall to the
ground; I should be elevated into the proud
position of a theatrical Wilkes, and the great
Gloriosa Theatre from that day would become
both profitable and historical.

                        SEVILLE.

IF from the neck of the long, transparent
green bottle of Manzanilla I was this day
week drinking, a golden-haired fairy had suddenly
emerged, and offered to convert me
into one large eye, so that I might take in
all that is beautiful and strange in the City
of Oranges, I should at once have waived all
right to the use of every other organ, have
felt grateful, and gone out to look about.

I had nearly been put to an ignominious
Juggernaut death by stopping to stare at
meek brown-eyed oxen, with long red-tasselled
taras jutting up for the sake of
ornament between their horns: I had sat
down entranced under orange-trees, and
gazed myself stupid looking up at the great
Moorish tower of prayer: I had thrown myself
into appropriate attitudes of meditation
over Columbus's grave, after wards finding that
it was his son's: I had boated on the muddy
Guadalquivir, and had visited the Moorish
Palace: Charles the Fifth in moonlit armour
had chaperoned me by night up the Serf's
Street, and round the site of the old Mosque:
Pedro the Cruel, arm-in-arm with a sultan
who carried his green turban under his arm,
because he had had the misfortune to lose
his head, chatted with me in the old Alameda,
as we passed the shop of Figaro, or looked in
at the door of Don Juan's old house: the
coloured darkness of the cathedral, the sunny
twilight of the veiled streets, shaded by
striped tent-like awnings: the sombre, monastic
streets, hot at noon as the desert
sand: the dusty, scorched suburbs, brown
and barren, were all known to me. I had
sucked the city of Seville like one of its own
oranges, and only the peel was left. A long
hot day remained, and how was I to spend it?

I look round my room at the Fonda de
Madrid, Plaza Magdalena. It wants ten
minutes to the table-d'hôte dinner. What
do I see? A bare white-washed room, the
floor paved with large, red, glazed tiles; the
walls hung with theatrical prints of Mazeppa,
with a good deal of white horse,
and a good deal more gymnastic struggling.
The broad, tall glass windows are
wide open: for it is burning fiery-furnace
hot, though it is now half-past four
o'clock, and the tumbling, tippling fountain,
that is always trying to empty its Danaë
bottle, splashes and trickles in the great hot
square, coolly and pleasantly enough. Not
that I see the said frolic-silver fountain;
because, to keep out the heat, there is a tent-like
awning twisted over my iron square
window-frame, and tied down all round to
the railing of the balcony. I am just up,
hot and steaming, from a short but pleasantly
sottish siesta, after a tiring walk in