It has been calculated by a celebrated mathematician, that out of every fourteen dozen of these stage-struck young gentlemen, one actually makes a first appearance. This event causes an enormous flutter in the circle of aspirants from which the promotion takes place. As the eventful night approaches, the most active and enterprising among them besiege the newspapers with elaborate puffs of their confrère, a column long, and are astonished and enraged that editors exclude them entirely, or exscissorize them to a dozen lines. Of what importance is the foreign news, in comparison with the first appearance of Bill Smithy in the arduous character of Hamlet? Has Colonel Greene no sympathy with struggling genius? Or is it the result of an infernal plot of the actors to put down competition, and sustain a professional monopoly?
The stage-struck young gentleman has passed through the fiery ordeal of "rehearsals," has been duly pushed and shaken into his "suit of sables," glittering with steel bugles, his hands have been adorned with black kids, his plumed hat rests upon his brow, his rapier dangles at his side. The curtain goes up and he is pushed upon the stage. His first appearance is the signal for a thundering round of generous applause, in which his faithful fellow-Forrestians are leading claquers. But the audience soon discover that he is a "guy" escaped from the surveillance an anxious mother. The stage-struck young gentleman is "goosed." Storms of hisses or bursts of ironical applause greet every sentence that he utters, and the curtain finally falls on his disgrace. This generally cures the disease of which we have been speaking. A night of agony, a week of pain, and the young gentleman, disenchanted and disenthralled, looks back upon his temporary mania with feelings of humiliation and surprise, cuts his aiders and abettors, and betakes himself seriously to the rational business of life.
But there are some stage-struck gentlemen whom nothing can convince of their total unfitness for the stage. You may hiss them night after night, you may present them with bouquets of carrots, and wreaths of cabbage leaves and onions, and leather medals, and services of tin plate; and if you find them "insensible to kindness," you may try brickbats—but in vain. They will cling to the stage for life—living, or rather starving, as attachés to some theatre, the signal for disturbance whenever they present themselves; detected by the lynx eyes of the public, whether disguised as Roman citizens or Neapolitan brigands, and severely punished for incompetency by heaped-up insult and abuse. These men live and die miserably; yet, doubtless, their lives are checkered with rays of hope; they regard themselves as martyrs, and die with the secret consciousness that they have "acted well their parts."
THE DIAMOND STAR;
OR,
THE ENGLISHMAN'S ADVENTURE.
A STORY OF VALENCIA.
In a fine summer night in the latter half of the seventeenth century, (the day and year are immaterial,) Clarence Landon, a handsome and high-spirited young Englishman, who had been passing some time in the south of Spain, was standing on the banks of the Guadalquiver, in the environs of the ancient city of Valencia, watching with anxious eyes the fading sails of a small felucca, just visible in the golden rays of the rising moon, as, catching a breath of the freshening western breeze, they bore the light craft out upon the blue bosom of the Mediterranean. Though the scene was one of surpassing beauty, though the air was balmy, and came to his brow laden with the fragrance of the orange, the myrtle, and the rose, the expression of the young man's face was melancholy in the extreme.