Faces in the Crowd.

WE talk of the wonderful richness of the world of nature, of its marvellous wealth of flowers and fruits, of its colours and forms, of the everchanging pattern of its clouds, of its flying shadows so tender and so swift, of its sunny glories and its troubled gloom; and we do well to talk of these things, and to delight in them and love them. But to me, grand and beautiful as is the world of nature, the world of man is far richer in material and of fuller interest. Geology and botany and entomology and landscape-painting are all fine things in their degree; but the study of humanity (not to go so deep into doubtful waters as to call it anthropology) is more sufficing-at least to my mind-and to watch the faces of a crowd, and to imagine their probable histories, a pleasanter pastime than catching butterflies and beetles, or making out whether this special yellow flower in my hand is one kind of hawkweed or another. A crowd is my museum, my living library, my animated specimen-case; and the study it affords me, and the amusement, are infinite and inexhaustible. I never come to the end of my work, and can always take it up again, every time I look out of the window, or turn my eyes from the stage to the audience.

Take now a theatre-just an ordinary theatre and an ordinary audience and you see there as many different specimens of humanity, and as sharply classified, as would make the life's fortune of a naturalist, could he find such affluence in his own department. All sorts are there-good and bad, bright and dull, night moths and day butterflies, things that are poisonous and things that are wholesome, beautiful things and ugly things, things that you love at first sight, and others from which you shrink instinctively, as birds shrink from snakes or horses tremble if they scent a tiger. You have only to look round and you see all this, and a great deal more; while, as for stories, every separate person is a three-volumed novel in himself, and you can read as many life-dramas as there are men and women to turn the pages. I will take up the title-pages of a few.

There is first that middle-class family party in the boxes-the handsome mother still comely to the eye and pleasant to the soul, with her "rising family" about her, and her comfortable husband behind-what a history hers is! Not exciting, not dramatic, with not a sensational chapter throughout; but what a poem full of love and pleasant service, of happy home affections, of unambitious prosperity, of honour and integrity and innocence it is! Her hands, a trifle thickened and enlarged, show the woman who does not disdain real useful household labour when it comes in her way; she can make a pudding if need be

(she always makes the cakes), she can iron when put to it, and even wash and bake, and she knows the uses of chamois leather and a duster better than many a Molly-the-maid with sixteen pounds a year, all found, and a crinoline as big as a brewer's tub. Her placid face, where a perpetual smile lurks in the corners of her mouth, shows the woman who loves and is beloved; the clear brow, where there is not a furrowed line as yet and no swelling of wrath or sunken pit of despair, the woman who has not much suffered, nor ever deeply sinned. Just the faithful wife, the loving mother, and careful housekeeper of the middle class-unromantic and unexciting-I confess there is intense pleasure to me in contemplating a life so pure and full of good uses as hers. It is a life which has something of country simplicity about it, and of quite country innocence. She lives in one of the suburbs, Bayswater or St. John's Wood, perhaps Brixton, and her husband has some employment in the City, which takes him away all day; as is fitting; braves having no business in the wigwam save for food and sleep; his income gives him enough for ease and honour, but not for luxury or finery, and she must be economical, and not disdain the savealls proper to each department. By which they get their occasional treats-the theatre once or twice in the year (not oftener), six weeks' fresh air in the summer months, and an early spring-time jaunt down to Richmond or Epping Forest; with friends dropping in, not seldom, to tea, and sometimes, but more rarely, a few of their own kind to dinner. I take her as the type of the pure-hearted, virtuous, and blameless middle-class woman of English society: and if you do not think her better worth looking at than a daddy-long-legs or a spotted lady-bird, I pity your bad taste, and do not envy your "proclivities."

Next to this family comes a very different triad-a brother and his two sisters. That they are "fast" is to be seen by their manner of dress; that they are poor by its material. Showy colours and out-of-theway patterns-a costume at once glaring and original, but every thing flimsy, frayed, and tumbled-hair flung wide abroad, and surely dressed in some unearthly fashion that may be picturesque, but is more likely ugly-jewelry which came from the Lowther Arcade-broad falls of mock-lace with beads and bugles strewn thick upon it-the girls without reserve or shyness-the brother familiar with the lower looks of London-life; you can make them out as distinctly as if you knew all about them for the last twenty years, and can catalogue them as easily as a publisher catalogues his books. You see that untidy, wasteful, scrambling house where they live; the mother dead, the father too easy or too much occupied to care for them; you see the constant fight with debt and duns which is the normal condition of their existence; the ever-renewing round of flirtations with young men whose last thought is marriage, and whose last wish would be one of these sisters; you understand the eager desire for pleasure reigning among them, the frantic love of show, the ignorance of that subtle quality-good taste,

which is not by any means dependent upon wealth; the slippery holding that they have on respectability of the higher sort. Not so much bad as weak, they are on the debateable ground; certainly not of the demi-monde, but girls whom that sweet mother in the midst of her young brood would instinctively shun as companions for her girls or playfellows for her boys. They come to the theatre with orders, and they come by an omnibus and in small cockety hats which they leave in the cloak-room, where they put on their supplemental finery: but they enjoy themselves, poor things! and if they do get mistaken by one or two as to their true relations with society, we must not be hard on them; they are young, vain, silly, and ignorant, and they have no mother to teach them better.

Then, look at those two little children in the private box, attended by their governess. Little aristocrats, Brahmins of the purest caste are they; all yellow hair, and white muslin frocks, and pink sashes, and golden combs, and the very perfection of care and cleanliness radiating like an atmosphere round them. You see that no expense is spared in the nursery which holds these precious jewels. Born in the purple-or if not quite in the purple, yet in a very sufficiently lustrous mauve-their whole being is one of perfume and sweetmeat, and rose-leaves without a crumple or a thorn. They are of the higher classes-the upper ten thousand; and their parents have carriages and horses, and rich appointments, and grand dwelling-places, and high-sounding titles, and are people to whom even pert London shopmen bow low in deep obeisance, to whom servants are respectful, and simple villagers adoring. The little creatures sit there in the front of the box, well in view of the house, as if they are of a race apart. The vigour and robustness of childhood is tempered with a certain languid grace and serene self-possession that is taught and cultivated as well as inherited; already their manners are courteous, and their bearing unembarrassed; already they feel the power of the slender golden bars which divide them from the commonalty, and are learning to look at life through the loopholes of the grating; already they are fitting themselves into their places, as young Olympians seated above the noisy clamours of the grosser world, and the utmost sympathy with that lower life which they will ever attain will be a vague kind of wondering pity that all are not Olympians like themselves; and how do folks manage to exist with their feet in the swamps and their heads below the clouds? Their governess, seated in the shadow, is of another class altogether. A gentlewoman and kindly cared for, yet she is on the outer side of the golden rails for all that; and the kindness shown her is patronage not companionship, the supreme condescension of the superiors too far removed to fear confusion or mistake.

In a line with them, but separated by posts and rails and draperies and all the rest of the material of tabooism, sit a couple of doubtfullooking young men, and with them a couple of more than doubtful

looking women. The men may be flashy clerks in a fast gallop on the road to ruin, or they may be swell-mobsmen, whose nearest make-up for gentlemen stops at the first syllable and leaves them gents. They may be either, I say; for there is a wonderful likeness between aped vice and actual, and what they are belongs to no one so much as what they seem. At all events, they have small hands which prove that they do no manual labour, and their nails are dirty-always an expressive symbol; their hair is plastered on their heads, and lank and greasy; their faces are sodden, pale, and unwholesome; they have "loud" ties and louder trousers; they have watch-chains and pins and rings and studs, the whole amount not worth this sheet of paper; and they know but one God in life-pleasure; and but one form of pleasure-vice. Unclean in mind and body, unwholesome in soul and skin, they are the exaggerations of the type of which that brother and his two sisters below them are milder forms; they show the vicious side of folly, and the seamy side of looseness. Yet they have mothers, both of them, nay, all of them; perhaps breaking their hearts at the facilis descensus each loved child is making, and turning back accusing thoughts upon themselves, wondering where they had gone astray, and when they had failed in the better teaching during the young days when souls were plastic, and the soil of conscience tender, and good seed could be rooted without trouble, and noble forms moulded with a little care. Those anxious thoughts of self-reproach embitter many a solitary hour, and ah! the deep shadow of the coming evil darkens many a saddened day!—the slippery descent becomes more perilously swift and easy as the moments pass; and there yawns the black gulf beyond, reached through the prison-gates, to end, it may be, with the gallows. Thoughts such as these trouble one's soul and dim one's eyes in the gay glitter of the evening; for what do we here with the blackened spectre of crime or the hateful lures of vice? what do we here with the deep sob of tragedy breaking through the light laughter of comedy? with tears in the seats of mirth, and sin in the high places where innocent gaiety alone should be? Let us turn from those two doubtful-looking men and their more than doubtful companions, and seek something brighter and fresher and gayer; seek something untainted and that we may love.

Ah, we have it! Down in the stalls sits a lady who may be born sister to the suburban mother in the boxes, for the sweetness and purity of her whole being. She is no longer young, but she is still like a great girl in the absence of all that teaching which experience of the worse side of human nature gives. She is evidently up from the country; you can see that by her somewhat old-fashioned and studied, but chronologically (according to milliners' chronology) inharmonious dress. The country comes out in the pattern of the skirt; the town in the fashion of the head-dress, bought at a great expense from one of the most fashionable shops in Regent Street, but fitting in badly with the rest of the attire, and singularly ill-suiting her manner of arranging her hair; she is

country in her girlish freshness; country in her sweet shyness, mother though she be; country in the wholeness of her pleasure, and the facility with which she can be amused: and as I sit and watch her and the great, handsome, heavily-built husband at her side, I am taken far far away to the delicious fragrance of the woods and gardens, and almost forget the scene in which I live. I see her pretty house on the lawn, with the meadow at the back and the shrubbery to the side, the cows dotted among the trees, and the big dog lying on the gravelwalk, slapping his thick tail heavily and looking to the house-door whence he expects his playmates, the half-dozen children of the household, to appear; I see all the freshness and cleanliness and delicious union of order and freedom that surround her; I know that she is respected, and that her husband is a moral magnate in his county, looked up to as a man irreproachable and incorruptible—she also holding a high moral place in her society, and her word going a long way with her neighbours. She dabbles a little in medicine-let us hope it is homoeopathic, where she can do but little harm if some good; she is credulous and inclined to the Davenports, mainly on the strength of her unanswered, "But how is it done?" she is Southern in her tendencies concerning the American war, and hates the Yankees if she pities the slaves; but she has not much political feeling on any question, and thinks these are things to be left to Providence and men- -women would only spoil what they did not understand; she is inclined to a quiet kind of High Church, by no means theatrical, but just sufficient to give the services a stateliness and show not unbefitting; she is pure in her own life, and innocent of the evil in the lives of others; and she and her sisters are the women who keep the English name respected and the English blood untainted. Without her and her like, God help us and the world!

What a mass of faces to study! Look at that sharp-eyed critic coming in merely for the new piece, and not even to the end of that; in whom spangles are only bits of tinfoil, and Sophonisba's crown and girdle of flaming jewels glass more or less badly coloured. He comes in merely to see how the new piece goes-"disillusioned" as to the world behind the scenes, perhaps as to the world before them! He knows all the actors and actresses, and their powers and capabilities, what are their best notes and what their most likely points; it is his business to understand them, as it is a haberdasher's to know what kind of ribbon he buys and sells; and that tawdry glittering world upon the stage is just so much raw material to him, representing his wife's housekeeping money and his own tailor's bill. How that pleasant suburban mother, or that great girl of forty from the country, would open their eyes in wonder, not of a pleasant sort, to hear this young man, who might be son to either, descant upon the "business" of the profession; as if actors and actresses were carpenters or weavers, or any other kind of being manipulating with tools, and not passionate, ethereal, supra