When the performances were concluded, our friends took coach for Mr. Warrington’s lodging, where the Virginians had provided an elegant supper. Mr. Warrington was eager to treat them in the handsomest manner, and the General and his wife accepted the invitation of the two bachelors, pleased to think that they could give their young friends pleasure. General and Mrs. Lambert, their son from college, their two blooming daughters, and Mr. Spencer of the Temple, a new friend whom George had met at the coffee-house, formed the party, and partook with cheerfulness of the landlady’s fare. The order of their sitting I have not been able exactly to ascertain; but, somehow, Miss Theo had a place next to the chickens and Mr. George Warrington, whilst Miss Hetty and a ham divided the attentions of Mr. Harry. Mrs. Lambert must have been on George’s right hand, so that we have but to settle the three places of the General, his son, and the Templar.

Mr. Spencer had been at the other theatre, where, on a former day, he had actually introduced George to the greenroom. The conversation about the play was resumed, and some of the party persisted in being delighted with it.

“As for what our gentlemen say, sir,” cries Mrs. Lambert to Mr. Spencer, “you must not believe a word of it. ’Tis a delightful piece, and my husband and Mr. George behaved as ill as possible.”

“We laughed in the wrong place, and when we ought to have cried,” the General owned, “that’s the truth.”

“You caused all the people in the boxes about us to look round and cry ‘Hush!’ You made the pit folks say, ‘Silence in the boxes, yonder!’ Such behaviour I never knew, and quite blushed for you, Mr. Lambert!”

“Mamma thought it was a tragedy, and we thought it was a piece of fun,” says the General. “George and I behaved perfectly well, didn’t we, Theo?”

“Not when I was looking your way, papa!” Theo replies. At which the General asks, “Was there ever such a saucy baggage seen?”

“You know, sir, I didn’t speak till I was bid,” Theo continues, modestly. “I own I was very much moved by the play, and the beauty and acting of Mrs. Woffington. I was sorry that the poor mother should find her child, and lose him. I am sorry, too, papa, if I oughtn’t to have been sorry!” adds the young lady, with a smile.

“Women are not so clever as men, you know, Theo,” cries Hetty from her end of the table, with a sly look at Harry. “The next time we go to the play, please, brother Jack, pinch us when we ought to cry, or give us a nudge when it is right to laugh.”

“I wish we could have had the fight,” said General Lambert, “the fight between little Norval and the gigantic Norwegian — that would have been rare sport: and you should write, Jack, and suggest it to Mr. Rich, the manager.”

“I have not seen that: but I saw Slack and Broughton at Marybone Gardens!” says Harry, gravely; and wondered if he had said something witty, as all the company laughed so? “It would require no giant,” he added, “to knock over yonder little fellow in the red boots. I, for one, could throw him over my shoulder.”

“Mr. Garrick is a little man. But there are times when he looks a giant,” says Mr. Spencer. “How grand he was in Macbeth, Mr. Warrington! How awful that dagger-scene was! You should have seen our host, ladies! I presented Mr. Warrington, in the greenroom, to Mr. Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard, and Lady Macbeth did him the honour to take a pinch out of his box.”

“Did the wife of the Thane of Cawdor sneeze?” asked the General, in an awful voice.

“She thanked Mr. Warrington, in tones so hollow and tragic, that he started back, and must have upset some of his rappee, for Macbeth sneezed thrice.”

“Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth!” cries the General.

“And the great philosopher who was standing by Mr. Johnson, says, ‘You must mind, Davy, lest thy sneeze should awaken Duncan!’ who, by the way, was talking with the three witches as they sat against the wall.”

“What! Have you been behind the scenes at the play? Oh, I would give worlds to go behind the scenes!” cries Theo.

“And see the ropes pulled, and smell the tallow-candles, and look at the pasteboard gold, and the tinsel jewels, and the painted old women, Theo? No. Do not look too close,” says the sceptical young host, demurely drinking a glass of hock. “You were angry with your papa and me.”

“Nay, George!” cries the girl.

“Nay? I say, yes! You were angry with us because we laughed when you were disposed to be crying. If I may speak for you, sir, as well as myself,” says George (with a bow to his guest, General Lambert), “I think we were not inclined to weep, like the ladies, because we stood behind the author’s scenes of the play, as it were. Looking close up to the young hero, we saw how much of him was rant and tinsel; and as for the pale, tragical mother, that her pallor was white chalk, and her grief her pocket-handkerchief. Own now, Theo, you thought me very unfeeling?”

“If you find it out, sir, without my owning it — what is the good of my confessing?” says Theo.

“Suppose I were to die?” goes on George, “and you saw Harry in grief, you would be seeing a genuine affliction, a real tragedy; you would grieve too. But you wouldn’t be affected if you saw the undertaker in weepers and a black cloak!”

“Indeed, but I should, sir!” says Mrs. Lambert; “and so, I promise you, would any daughter of mine.”

“Perhaps we might find weepers of our own, Mr. Warrington,” says Theo, “in such a case.”

“Would you?” cries George, and his cheeks and Theo’s simultaneously flushed up with red; I suppose because they both saw Hetty’s bright young eyes watching them.

“The elder writers understood but little of the pathetic,” remarked Mr. Spencer, the Temple wit.

“What do you think of Sophocles and Antigone?” calls out Mr. John Lambert.

“Faith, our wits trouble themselves little about him, unless an Oxford gentleman comes to remind us of him! I did not mean to go back farther than Mr. Shakspeare, who, as you will all agree, does not understand the elegant and pathetic as well as the moderns. Has he ever approached Belvidera, or Monimia, or Jane Shore; or can you find in his comic female characters the elegance of Congreve?” and the Templar offered snuff to the right and left.

“I think Mr. Spencer himself must have tried his hand?” asks some one.

“Many gentlemen of leisure have. Mr. Garrick, I own, has had a piece of mine and returned it.”

“And I confess that I have four acts of a play in one of my boxes,” says George.

“I’ll be bound to say it’s as good as any of ’em,” whispers Harry to his neighbour.

“Is it a tragedy or a comedy?” asks Mrs. Lambert.

“Oh, a tragedy, and two or three dreadful murders at least!” George replies.

“Let us play it, and let the audience look to their eyes! Yet my chief humour is for a tyrant,” says the General.

“The tragedy, the tragedy! Go and fetch the tragedy this moment, Gumbo!” calls Mrs. Lambert to the black. Gumbo makes a low bow and says, “Tragedy? yes, madam.”

“In the great cowskin trunk, Gumbo,” George says, gravely.

Gumbo bows and says, “Yes, sir,” with still superior gravity.

“But my tragedy is at the bottom of I don’t know how much linen, packages, books, and boots, Hetty.”

“Never mind, let us have it, and fling the linen out of window!” cries Miss Hetty.

“And the great cowskin trunk is at our agent’s at Bristol: so Gumbo must get post-horses, and we can keep it up till he returns the day after tomorrow,” says George.

The ladies groaned a comical “Oh!” and papa, perhaps more seriously, said, “Let us be thankful for the escape. Let us be thinking of going home too. Our young gentlemen have treated us nobly, and we will all drink a parting bumper to Madam Esmond Warrington of Castlewood, in Virginia. Suppose, boys, you were to find a tall, handsome stepfather when you got home? Ladies as old as she have been known to marry before now.”

“To Madam Esmond Warrington, my old schoolfellow!” cries Mrs. Lambert. “I shall write and tell her what a pretty supper her sons have given us: and, Mr. George, I won’t say how ill you behaved at the play!” And, with this last toast, the company took leave; the General’s coach and servant, with a flambeau, being in waiting to carry his family home.

After such an entertainment as that which Mr. Warrington had given, what could be more natural or proper than a visit from him to his guests, to inquire how they had reached home and rested? Why, their coach might have taken the open country behind Montague House, in the direction of Oxford Road, and been waylaid by footpads in the fields. The ladies might have caught cold or slept ill after the excitement of the tragedy. In a word, there was no reason why he should make any excuse at all to himself or them for visiting his kind friends; and he shut his books early at the Sloane Museum, and perhaps thought, as he walked away thence, that he remembered very little about what he had been reading.

Pray what is the meaning of this eagerness, this hesitation, this pshaing and shilly-shallying, these doubts, this tremor as he knocks at the door of Mr. Lambert’s lodgings in Dean Street, and survey the footman who comes to his summons? Does any young man read? does any old one remember? does any wearied, worn, disappointed pulseless heart recall the time of its full beat and early throbbing? It is ever so many hundred years since some of us were young; and we forget, but do not all forget. No, madam, we remember with advantages, as Shakspeare’s Harry promised his soldiers they should do if they survived Agincourt and that day of St. Crispin. Worn old chargers turned out to grass, if the trumpet sounds over the hedge, may we not kick up our old heels, and gallop a minute or so about the paddock, till we are brought up roaring? I do not care for clown and pantaloon now, and think the fairy ugly, and her verses insufferable: but I like to see children at a pantomime. I do not dance, or eat supper any more; but I like to watch Eugenio and Flirtilla twirling round in a pretty waltz, or Lucinda and Ardentio pulling a cracker. Burn y............