within a minute of the end of each act. Then he gets suddenly let in,
generally by the comic man. It always happens so. Yet the villain is
always intensely surprised each time. He never seems to learn
anything from experience.

A few years ago the villain used to be blessed with a hopeful and
philosophical temperament, which enabled him to bear up under these
constantly recurring disappointments and reverses. It was "no
matter," he would say. Crushed for the moment though he might be, his
buoyant heart never lost courage. He had a simple, child-like faith
in Providence. "A time will come," he would remark, and this idea
consoled him.

Of late, however, this trusting hopefulness of his, as expressed in
the beautiful lines we have quoted, appears to have forsaken him. We
are sorry for this. We always regarded it as one of the finest traits
in his character.

The stage villain's love for the heroine is sublime in its
steadfastness. She is a woman of lugubrious and tearful disposition,
added to which she is usually incumbered with a couple of priggish and
highly objectionable children, and what possible attraction there is
about her we ourselves can never understand; but the stage
villain--well, there, he is fairly mashed on her.

Nothing can alter his affection. She hates him and insults him to an
extent that is really unladylike. Every time he tries to explain his
devotion to her, the hero comes in and knocks him down in the middle
of it, or the comic man catches him during one or the other of his
harassing love-scenes with her, and goes off and tells the "villagers"