men who don't understand the precious jewel he weareth in his head;--but
the week's hard work is got through somehow; and on Sundays he sallies
forth for rural air with a little knot of friends, and the talk is of art,
and letters, and the world. So quick and keen a nature as his had immense
buoyancy in it. Nay, for the very dun young Douglas had an epigram,--as
bright, but not as welcome, as a sovereign. A saying of those early days
has found its way into a comedy,--but not the less belongs to his authentic
biography. A threatening attorney shakes his fist at the villakin where at
the window the wit is parleying with him. "I'll put a man in the house,
Sir!" "Couldn't you," says Douglas, (and of course the right-minded reader
is shocked,) "couldn't you make it a woman?" What a scandalous way to treat
a man of business! Between Douglas and the lawyers, for many years, there
was open war. He was a kind of Robin Hood to these representatives of the
Crown,--adopting the plucky and defiant gaiety of the old outlaw, and
shooting keen arrows at them with a bow that never grew weak.

The theatres were his regular sources of employment for many years, and he
wrote dramas at a salary. Tradition and family connection must have led
him chiefly to this walk; for though he had some of the most important
qualities of a dramatist, very few of his dramas seem likely to live,--and
even these are not equal to his works in other departments. The "Man made
of Money" will outlast his best play. His most popular drama,--"Black-eyed
Susan,"--though clever, pretty, and tender, is not, as a work of art,
worthy of his genius; nor did he consider it so himself. In his dramas
we find, I think, rather touches of character, than characters,--scenes,
rather than plots,--_disjecta membra_ of dramatic genius, rather than
harmonious creations of it. He could not separate himself from his work
sufficiently for the purposes of the higher stage. As Johnson says of
"Cato," "We pronounce the name of Cato, but we think on Addison,"--so one
may say of any character of Jerrold's, that it suggests and refers us to