tion. To the prettiest damsel that ever opened door, he has only time to say, "Tibbs, esquire, twopence; not a word about her eyes. The damsel, indeed, dislikes him, for his knock affects her nerves, and he calls out to her to "make haste;" she hates making haste. These hardships are a part of his ordinary and inevitable experience; but he has numberless accidental ills; vain hunts after those who are "gone away;" wearying inquiries for people "not known in King-street;" infinite toil and disappointment in taking letters to the wrong Mr. Smith.

But if his lot has been thus dreary in the past, how darker than Erebus is its future aspect! The stampduty is reduced, and his duty will be doubled! The weight of the whole press is on the Postman; we have lessened the burden of one to increase that of the other. His mind staggered before, his body must now totter also. The difference of burden is that difference between a sheet of letter-paper and a double "Atlas." Additional millions of broad sheets are to be put in the post; and if these must be delivered, who shall deliver the Postman? Pale cheeks there were, and saddened hearts, in the newspaper-department of the Post-office, when the first weekly supplies of penny stamps were brought in, heaped in huge bundles, for transmission into the country. Enormous packages of the old unstamped, with the red mark of legality affixed to them for the first time, were laid down one by one before the wide-staring eyes of the appointed receiver. He stood aghast at the omen.

"And are these," he asked, "these many bundles, each of them a load, are they all one paper? Has it only a country circulation, and are we to transmit it? Why, there are several of the unstamped besides this; and those also are legalised. There are, moreover,

half-a-dozen new papers. Is the Post-office to despatch them all, in addition to the increase upon the old papers daily and weekly? Impossible! If this is a specimen of the change, then farewell, for ever, blessed peace of mind; farewell content! Mr. " he continued, turning to a petrified postman standing by, we can never stand against this new system. This is really too bad. Our carts will break down under this new load; they were never built for such work. Look here, here's a package to go by post. None of our machinery will stand it; the thing can't be done. But the trial must be made, I suppose, and Heaven pity us under it, say I. I guess what we have to go through, I see it all. Well; here, you Jem, try and lift this package out of the way; they must all go, they're legal I find, all stamped!"

His imagination daily threw deeper shadows upon a prospect gloomy enough in itself. Within a week from the hour when the first penny stamp was passed through the Post-office, the sensitive and forlorn functionary, whose words we have recorded almost verbatim, was dead. We are far from being sure that the feverish excitement and morbid apprehensiveness evinced in his first anticipation of the destructive change, are not to be regarded as the direct cause of the calamity. Beyond a doubt they were the predisposing causes of dissolution. He "saw it all," as he believed; and persuaded himself, from the evidences furnished on the first morning, that a state of things had begun which the "oldest inhabitant" of the Post-office might quake to look upon. The fear of the "pressure from without," impelled him suddenly onward into the grave.

If the new system should produce but a thousandth part of the toil, pain, harassing and hopelessness, anticipated as its natural effects by its first victim,

what a dreary destiny must the Postman's be! One drop added to a full cup produces the overflow; the last feather breaks the tough back of the camel: thus the last newspaper, the one extra sheet, must weigh down the pitiable carrier, body as well as spirit to the dust. And a heavy, heavy additional burden is he doomed to bear. His daily walk is prolonged; his double knocks perchance are doubled. In the country the extent of his delivery is threefold at least; in the metropolis it is frightfully extended, for the newspaper is charged but half-price. For a single penny you receive your newspaper in town; the consequence is that many thousands are passed into the Postman's hands, which otherwise he would have escaped. Nor must it be forgotten, that as this becomes known, the evil will increase. The wanderer will have no respite from perambulation; the walking gentleman will never have time to sit down. He will move on, the very personification of the Movement; the realizer of the Perpetual Motion; the legitimate son of Restlessness. "Walker's Dictionary" will furnish no superlative epithet capable of describing the ceaselessness of his pedestrianism, the monotony of his miserable toil. Yes, his long lane will present no turning; not a hope can visit him in the thick meshes of that despair which surrounds him wherever he goes. His life will not be life, but merely mechanical motion, the action of the moving wax-figure which passes him in triumphal procession as he proceeds on his round. Happy unconsciousness! Thrice-fortunate art thou, oh! waxen wanderer! The mechanism by which the Postman passes onward to his destined stopping-place; the pause of a moment; involves a living sensibility to the pang of every movement; yet on he must go. Punch and Judy may hold out temptations to stay, for a minute only, at the corner

of the street; but in vain for him. His fate is a relentless one. Were visions of Paradise suddenly opened upon his gaze as he crosses the end of an unpropitious turning, he dare not pause even to gaze, still less turn a letter's breadth out of his way. He must leave the uppermost epistle of the pack in the next street: he has no choice: he cannot comprehend what the voluntary principle means. Passive obedience is his doctrine; he never dreams of having a will of his own. He seems to travel forward freely, and to cross the street as though he really deemed himself a native of a land of liberty; but he is a bondman. He walks through life with the gait of a willing agent; yet ever as he walks, wears fetters, clankless and invisible.

PORTRAITS OF NOTORIOUS CHARACTERS.

No. 1.-THE THEATRICAL LESSEE.

THE theatrical lessee is a practical logician. Being destitute of money, he enters into contracts, binding himself to pay some fifty thousand pounds per annum : being equally destitute of morals, he undertakes to provide rational entertainment for a "discerning public." Peculiarly innocent of all idea of the uses and objects of the stage, he resolves upon taking the drama under his special protection. In short, having nothing to lose, he determines to risk all he is worth; being Dogberry, he becomes constable of the watch, as the "most desartless man." He regards Shakspeare as an author properly honoured in having his statue erected outside the theatre: he confesses that if "Hamlet" were now to be offered him, an entirely new play, he would not produce it; unless, perhaps, the author undertook to appear as the

Ghost. As an indifferently bad actor, even Shakspeare would have a claim upon him. He evinces his understanding of the scope and principle of the drama, when he observes, "We don't want literature, we want pieces." He objects to all productions that have much "talk" in them; they only tend to encourage the high-priced actors. First-rate performers he looks upon as necessary evils, and he engages them, one at a time, at short intervals: third-rates are his favourites, because they show by their acting that the "regular drama sends people to sleep ;” they prove that Shakspeare "don't draw!" That is the only point which he conscientiously struggles to establish that the public despises excellence: and upon the truth of his proposition his chance of being tolerated depends. He may, however, be brought to forgive an actor for being a genius, always providing that he is not likewise a gentleman: the actor who introduces gentlemanly habits into the theatre is supposed to offer a personal insult to the lessee. In like manner he resents, as becomingly as he can, the impertinent superiority of the few ladies of his company who obstinately maintain the singularity of unsullied virtue; purity of character he considers to be a disgrace to his establishment. His remonstrance is, "I may as well shut up my theatre at once, if common decency is to be observed." The interests of the stage require that every pretty actress should listen to honourable green-room proposals, and submit to a change of viscounts occasionally, at the suggestion, and for the accommodation, of the lessee. The qualifications of an actress are thought to depend upon the question, not "what she can do?" but, "whose cab brought her to the theatre?" The actor he engages on the strength of his lungs, the actress on the strength of her legs. If compelled, by perverse fortune, to come to terms with the first tragedian of the day, and to engage