each other?  We are still.  We share our toffy; go halves at the tuck-shop; do each other’s exercises; prompt each other with the word in construing or repetition; and tell the most frightful fibs to prevent each other from being found out.  We meet each other in public.  Ware a fight!  Get them into different parts of the room!  Our friends hustle round us.  Capulet and Montague are not more at odds than the houses of Roundabout and Wrightabout, let us say.  It is, “My dear Mrs. Buffer, do kindly put yourself in the chair between those two men!” Or, “My dear Wrightabout, will you take that charming Lady Blancmange down to supper?  She adores your poems, and gave five shillings for your autograph at the fancy fair.”  In like manner the peacemakers gather round Roundabout on his part; he is carried to a distant corner, and coaxed out of the way of the enemy with whom he is at feud.

When we meet in the Square at Verona, out flash rapiers, and we fall to.  But in his private mind Tybalt owns that Mercutio has a rare wit, and Mercutio is sure that his adversary is a gallant gentleman.  Look at the amphitheatre yonder.  You do not suppose those gladiators who fought and perished, as hundreds of spectators in that grim Circus held thumbs down, and cried, “Kill, kill!”—­you do not suppose the combatants of necessity hated each other?  No more than the celebrated trained bands of literary sword-and-buckler men hate the adversaries whom they meet in the arena.  They engage at the given signal; feint and parry; slash, poke, rip each other open, dismember limbs, and hew off noses:  but in the way of business, and, I trust, with mutual private esteem.  For instance, I salute the warriors of the Superfine Company with the honors due among warriors.  Here’s at you, Spartacus, my lad.  A hit, I acknowledge.  A palpable hit!  Ha! how do you like that poke in the eye in return?  When the trumpets sing truce, or the spectators are tired, we bow to the noble company:  withdraw; and get a cool glass of wine in our rendezvous des braves gladiateurs.

By the way, I saw that amphitheatre of Verona under the strange light of a lurid eclipse some years ago:  and I have been there in spirit for these twenty lines past, under a vast gusty awning, now with twenty thousand fellow-citizens looking on from the benches, now in the circus itself, a grim gladiator with sword and net, or a meek martyr—­was I?—­brought out to be gobbled up by the lions? or a huge, shaggy, tawny lion myself, on whom the dogs were going to be set?  What a day of excitement I have had to be sure!  But I must get away from Verona, or who knows how much farther the Roundabout Pegasus may carry me?