a certain irresistible healthfulness that surrounds him, as they are to his skill and his prescriptions.  The lawyer who is a humourist is a man of ten thousand.  How easily the worldly-wise face, puckered over a stiff brief, relaxes into the lines of laughter.  He sees many an evil side of human nature, he is familiar with slanders and injustice, all kinds of human bitterness and falsity; but neither his hand nor his heart becomes “imbued with that it works in,” and the little admixture of acid, inevitable from his circumstances and mode of life, but heightens the flavour of his humour.  But of all humourists of the professional class, I prefer the clergyman, especially if he is well stricken in years, and has been anchored all his life in a country charge.  He is none of your loud wits.  There is a lady-like delicacy in his mind, a constant sense of his holy office, which warn him off dangerous subjects.  This reserve, however, does but improve the quality of his mirth.  What his humour loses in boldness, it gains in depth and slyness.  And as the good man has seldom the opportunity of making a joke, or of procuring an auditor who can understand one, the dewy glitter of his eyes, as you sit opposite him, and his heartfelt enjoyment of the matter in hand, are worth going a considerable way to witness.  It is not, however, in the professions that the vagabond is commonly found.  Over these that awful and ubiquitous female, Mrs. Grundy—­at once Fate, Nemesis, and Fury—­presides.  The glare of her eye is professional danger, the pointing of her finger is professional death.  When she utters a man’s name, he is lost.  The true vagabond is to be met with in other walks of life,—­among actors, poets, painters.  These may grow in any way their nature directs.  They are not required to conform to any traditional pattern.  With regard to the respectabilities and the “minor morals,” the world permits them to be libertines.  Besides, it is a temperament peculiarly sensitive, or generous, or enjoying, which at the beginning impels these to their special pursuits; and that temperament, like everything else in the world, strengthens with use, and grows with what it feeds on.  We look upon an actor, sitting amongst ordinary men and women, with a certain curiosity,—­we regard him as a creature from another planet, almost.  His life and his world are quite different from ours.  The orchestra, the foot-lights, and the green baize curtain, divide us.  He is a monarch half his time—­his entrance and his exit proclaimed by flourish of trumpet.  He speaks in blank verse, is wont to take his seat at gilded banquets, to drink nothing out of a pasteboard goblet.  The actor’s world has a history amusing to read, and lines of noble and splendid traditions, stretching back to charming Nelly’s time, and earlier.  The actor has strange experiences.  He sees the other side of the moon.  We roar at Grimaldi’s funny face:  he sees the lines of pain in it.  We hear Romeo