cupied seat, "we have not long begun our repast-the lobster salad excellent, scolloped oysters, undoubted natives, and most savoury morsels, and the "

"With all my heart I'll join ye, and by Saint Patherick I will imprimis, pay my devoirs to the lobster salad."

"A few moments sooner, Jerry, and you would have heard his lordship spouting Shakspeare. One fair Bianca, on whose witcheries he hath gazed to-night, and who with sylph-like tread has tripped the boards, hath in very truth stolen away, nolens volens, his to sensitive and quickly captivated

heart!"

"By the powers! as far as my own experience goes, stolen hearts are a kind of property soon recovered, and when regained are seldom injured by the theft," laughingly replied the Hibernian.

"You sons of the Emerald Isle are a set of careless, roving, love-making, and loveforgetting dogs, who, with every moon could make a fresh and fiery love, and the last vowed to, desired the most, because, forsooth,

she was the last; on this side the Irish sea we are more stable, and in all such matters more unchangeable," observed Inglis with a smile.

"By Jove she is a charming creature, and I will gain an introduction to her if I liveI will!" said Squanderfield, at the same time heartily bringing down his clenched fist on the table in vulgar manifestation of his resolve. "Did you not see her at Drury Lane tonight, Fitzgerald ?"

"No, I have been to profit by a more refined performance. I have been, my lord, to the Italian Opera."

"Diavolo take your Italian Operas; their mawkish foreign tastes, are corrupting our pure Anglo-Saxon fashions-perverting our old English customs. Our fathers and grandfathers in good old times were wont to love the British Drama, and is the genius of the stage to be usurped by swarthy fiddlers and equivocal cantatrices? Sorry for your morbid partialities, Fitzgerald-sorry for you, my good fellow-I am indeed!" observed Squanderfield, whose boast it was that he

was English to the back-bone, and that he hated everything in the shape and nature of symphonies, sweet concords, and cat-gut.

"Egad! my lord, I could, were I in the learnedly argumentative humour, undertake to prove to you that dramatic entertainments are more peculiarly adapted for that transition state of society when barbarism is giving way to civilized enlightenment than any other.

The drama was suited to those

periods, when the minds of the masses had to be affected more through the senses than by any principles of abstract reasoning. Was it not so when Homeric tragedies were performed at the Olympic games, and when in the Grecian theatres the creations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Eschylus melted the hearts of 'god-like men,' and fired the breasts of Athenian maids and Spartan mothers? Was it not by this, the representative means, that the Roman legions and the crowds of the Forum were incited to bravery when their untutored minds could thus be best impressed? In ages now passing away, the nations of modern Europe have been po

tently influenced by theatric performances; in the theatre precepts and manners have been taught which impulsated through entire communities. Unlettered understandings can most successfully be acted upon by illustration and character, and mankind are by nature more prone to seek that which delights, which is facile and comprehensive, rather than to elaborate truths from dull and uninteresting sources.

"In these days when the populace can read, when education has become more general, and as all men have more or less of the ideal and creative in their souls, novels and fictitious romances have in a great degree supplied the place of scenic acts and costumed characters. The pictured pages of the Richardsons, Smolletts, and Fieldings, and now of the Great Unknown, are comfortably available over the sea-coal fire, and 'the mind's eye, Horatio' figures up the dramatis persone in all the colouring of effect and fascination which imagination pourtrays. When you can have these luxuries at home, pray who would go to Drury Lane in such

nights as this for the false and foolish addenda of ranting and rouge, spangles and tinsel? Music, sweet, heart overpowering music, with its dulcet sounds has in some measure usurped, and will in greater degree usurp, the place of the drama; to be heard in perfection it must be heard in multitudinous concord-ergo I go to the opera."

"My dear Fitzgerald, you speak onesidedly," replied Lord Squanderfield, who for a brief interval seemed to have forgot Bianca and her charms. "A finely sustained tragedy will ever delight mankind-will always impress the passions of men-it is the palpable and the appreciable revelation of the heart's hidden workings-the stern and truly delineated portraiture of sentiments, and feelings, which are the natural impulses of the human breast. The beholder gazes with pleasure upon the representation, because his inward emotions at the moment become identified with what he sees and hears-his sympathies are excited towards the cause of injured virtue, or his indignation aroused against tyranny and vice. By the close