“London is the best place in the world for a lad of spirit. See life there,—‘glass of fashion and mould of form.’ Fond of the play, sir?”
“I never saw one.”
“Possible!” cried the gentleman, dropping the handle of his knife, and bringing up the point horizontally; “then, young man,” he added solemnly, “you have,—but I won’t say what you have to see. I won’t say,—no, not if you could cover this table with golden guineas, and exclaim, with the generous ardor so engaging in youth, ‘Mr. Peacock, these are yours if you will only say what I have to see!’”
I laughed outright. May I be forgiven for the boast, but I had the reputation at school of a pleasant laugh. The young man’s face grew dark at the sound; he pushed back his plate and sighed.
“Why,” continued his friend, “my companion here, who, I suppose, is about your own age, he could tell you what a play is,—he could tell you what life is. He has viewed the manners of the town; ‘perused the traders,’ as the Swan poetically remarks. Have you not, my lad, eh?”
Thus directly appealed to, the boy looked up with a smile of scorn on his lips,—
“Yes, I know what life is, and I say that life, like poverty, has strange bed-fellows. Ask me what life is now, and I say a melodrama; ask me what it is twenty years hence, and I shall say—”
“A farce?” put in his comrade.
“No, a tragedy,—or comedy as Moliere wrote it.”
“And how is that?” I asked, interested and somewhat surprised at the tone of my contemporary.