“I sneer! you mistake me; you have adduced a most convincing argument—­esprit de corps!—­good!  Your clubs certainly nourish sociality greatly; those little tables, with one sulky man before one sulky chop—­those hurried nods between acquaintances—­that, monopoly of newspapers and easy chairs—­all exhibit to perfection the cementing faculties of a club.  Then, too, it certainly does an actor inestimable benefit to mix with lords and squires.  Nothing more fits a man for his profession, than living with people who know nothing about it.  Only think what a poor actor Kean is; you would have made him quite a different thing, if you had tied him to a tame gentlemen in the ‘Garrick Club’.  He would have played ‘Richard’ in a much higher vein, I doubt not.”

“Well,” said I, “the stage is your affair at present, and doubtless you do right to reject any innovation.”

“Why, yes,” quoth the Devil, looking round; “we have a very good female supply in this quarter.  But pray how comes it that the English are so candid in sin?  Among all nations there is immorality enough, Heaven knows; but you are so delightfully shameless:  if a crime is committed here, you can’t let it ‘waste its sweetness;’ you thrust it into your papers forthwith; you stick it up on your walls; you produce it at your theatres; you chat about it as an agreeable subject of conversation; and then you cry out with a blush against the open profligacy abroad!  This is one of those amiable contradictions in human nature that charms me excessively.  You fill your theatres with ladies of pleasure—­you fill your newspapers with naughty accounts—­a robbery is better to you than a feast—­and a good fraud in the city will make you happy for a week; and all this while you say:  ’We are the people who send vice to Coventry, and teach the world how to despise immorality.’  Nay, if one man commits a murder, your newspapers kindly instruct his associates how to murder in future, by a far safer method.  A wretch kills a boy for the surgeons, by holding his head under water; ‘Silly dog!’ cries the Morning Herald, ’why did not he clap a sponge dipped in prussic acid to the boy’s mouth?’”

Here we were interrupted by a slight noise in the next box, which a gentleman had just entered.  He was a tall man, with a handsome face and very prepossessing manner.

“That is an Author of considerable reputation,” said my Devil, “quiet, though a man of wit, and with a heart, though a man of the world.  Talking of the drama, he once brought out a farce, which had the good fortune to be damned.  As great expectations had been formed of it, and the author’s name had transpired; the unsuccessful writer rose the next morning with a hissing sound in his ears, and that leaning towards misanthropy, which you men always experience when the world has the bad taste to mistake your merits.  ‘Thank Fate, however,’ said the Author, ’it is damned thoroughly—­it is off the stage—­I cannot be hissed again—­in