stalls of an English playhouse, and that my business to-night is only, by implication, with "the footsteps in Italy of William Shakespeare," but more directly with Mademoiselle Stella Colas, from the Imperial French Theatre at St. Petersburg, who undertakes the part of Juliet, and, thorough Frenchwoman as she is, plays it in English.

The pretty creature! Mademoiselle Stella Colas is by this time gone back to St. Petersburg, and the praise or blame I am presumptuous enough to mete out to her will probably never reach her ears, unless indeed the editor of the Nevsky Magazine chooses to transfer this article (which he is very welcome to) to the next number of his publication. Nor, perhaps, were this "Breakfast in Bed" brought under the notice of the charming Stella, would she be much the wiser for it; for I have heard spiteful people on this side of the water hint that her acquaintance with the English vernacular was of the most limited nature, and that she mastered the speeches set down for Capulet's hapless daughter mainly in the poll-parrot fashion. "Tis no disgrace for a French tragédienne to have done so. Have we not all been told that the illustrious Rachel herself was not gifted with the faculty of understanding much of the purport of the lines she spoke; that, word by word, and syllable by syllable, the couplets had to be laboriously drummed into her, until she was in a position to débiter la tirade; and that those wonderful movements and bits of by-play-few in number, certainly, and somewhat monotonous-which used to excite our amazement and admiration were all taught her, in the purest mechanical manner, by her instructor, Monsieur Sanson? Rachel did not care much as to what author she recited from; Racine, Corneille, Molière, Ducis, or Legouvé, were all the same to her. She had something in her,-wonderful, Heaven-given genius; but it lay deep, dormant; it wanted smelting; the gold needed to be separated from the ore; and it was for Monsieur Sanson to use the divining-rod and the digger's cradle. The English actor-was it Mr. John Ryder?-whose pleasant task it was to "coach" Stella Colas had not, perhaps, so difficult a labour. This fascinating young woman was evidently highly appreciative and imaginative, and probably seized the scope and meaning of Juliet's character long before she understood the half of Shakespeare's words. I question whether, after all, she had any thing beyond a vaguely general comprehension of them.

The pretty creature! I say again. Was there ever such a darling Juliet? Lest I should be accused of impertinent personality in thus publicly expressing my admiration for a pretty girl, let it be understood that my compliments are addressed, not to her, but to the series of cartes de visite published towards the close of her engagement. Her photographs were well-nigh as pretty as herself. Such childish innocence; such languorous love of the handsome Montague with the green-silk legs; such winning fondness for the nurse who scolded but idolised her; such affectionate reverence for her harsh papa and mamma; such trust and confidence in Friar Lawrence; such sweet and simple womanly daintinesses,were probably never developed by the camera before.

And here let me be permitted a slight digression. To us English people of the nineteenth century, the behaviour of Capulet and his wife to their daughter can scarcely fail to appear barbarous and unnatural. We have match-making mammas in our midst, no doubt, who lead their daughters a terrible life on vexed questions of matrimonial alliance; and ill-natured papas, who threaten to cut their girls off with a shilling if they don't immediately discard the penniless captain for the rich cottonspinner. But the Capulets in modern life are, I hope, extinct; or, if they are to be found lurking in odd nooks and corners, they must be set down as monstrosities. Take yourself back to medieval Italy, however, and Juliet's papa and mamma become the most natural people in the world. The old Italian novels and chronicles are full of Lord and Lady Capulets. If we glance at a recent, to say little of the present, state of French society, we shall find parental harshness carried to an extent scarcely less hideous. Do you remember Ginevra, the heroine of Honoré de Balzac's most pathetic romance? Ginevra is only Juliet. Her vindictive Corsican parents are only Capulets; the man she persists in marrying is simply a Montague "Marry the County Paris, or get thee to a nunnery." "Marry the County Paris, or be turned out of doors." "Do as you are bidden, or be locked up in the coal-ce'lar on bread-and-water." "Choose your bridal dress, or never see your papa and mamma's face again." These were the agreeable refrains of the family ditty.

I am afraid that, if we turned away from Italy and directed our glance towards England, we should find enough of parental cruelty and to spare, not only in Shakespeare's time, but for a hundred and fifty years afterwards. In one of Cibber's comedies a young married lady, say Belinda, asks another youthful matron, say Clarissa, who detests her husband, why she did not marry the man of her choice. "My mother would have whipped me," answers Clarissa simply. And Materfamilias would have whipped her, too. The story of Dr. Johnson and the young ladies in Lincolnshire might be quoted in confirmation; likewise old Aubrey's garrulous account of things as they were in his youth (close upon Shakespeare's time), when mothers corrected their daughters with their fans,—the handle at least half a yard long,-and "in the days of their besom discipline used to slash their daughters when they were perfect women." In the great case of the Reverend Mr. Crofton, a Puritan divine, who was prosecuted for barbarously beating his servant-girl, he was asked why he had not used a wand or cane for the purpose of chastisement; whereupon his reverence replied that "his mother, once beating her maid with a wand, did chance to strike out her eye, which caused him thenceforth to mislike such usage." A pretty state of things; but our great-great-grandmothers were nevertheless subject to it. Hear Aubrey again: "The gentry and citizens had little learning of any kind, and their way of breeding up their children was suitable to the rest. They were as severe to their children as their schoolmasters, and their schoolmasters as masters of the House of Correction. The child perfectly

loathed the sight of his parents, as the slave his torture. Gentlemen of thirty and forty years old were to stand like mutes and fools bareheaded before their parents; and the daughters (grown women) were to stand at the cupboard-side during the whole time of the proud mother's visit, unless (as the fashion was) leave was desired, forsooth, that a cushion should be given them to kneel upon, brought by the serving man, after they had done sufficient penance in standing." Ah, the grand old days of authority and discipline! There is a "court cupboard” mentioned in Romeo and Juliet, and it was doubtless by this "cupboard-side" that poor Juliet stood when it pleased her "proud mother" to visit her.

With this you may compare Lady Jane Grey's account of her early tribulations, and her nippings and pinchings in the Suffolk family; but to my mind the clearest gloss on the Capulets' usage of their daughter is to be found in the undeniably old ballad of " Willikins and his Dinah," revived in our time with such brilliant success as a comic song by Mr. Robson:

"As Dinah was a walkin' in the garden one day,
She met with her father, who to her did say,

'Right tooral, right tooral,' &c.
'Go! Dinah, go dress yourself in gorgeous array,
For I've met with a young man so pleasant and gay;
I've met with a young man of ten thousand a year,
And he says that he'll make you his love and his dear.
'Right tooral, right tooral,'

You know how Dinah pleads her youth, and that "to marry that moment she's not much inclined;" and how her "stern parient" flies into a passion, and threatens to leave his large fortune to the nearest of kin; whereupon Dinah commits suicide, and Willikins felo de se. You may object that all this is but an after parody of Shakespeare's tragedy, "cup of cold pison" included; but I hold the "London Liquor Merchant," from which Mr. Robson's comic ditty was derived, to be at least as old as "Barbara Allen" and the "Bailiff's Daughter of Islington," and if not contemporary with, anterior to, Shakespeare's age. Both the ballad and the play are indignant protests against paternal barshness; and there may be some truth in the tradition that Shakespeare was incited by Lords Essex and Southampton to bend his wonderful genius to the embodiment of such a protest on the stage to call down public indignation on a Draconic domestic ccde imported from abroad, and which, if we are to believe the memoirs of Silvio Pellico, existed in Italian households so late.

And I have kept poor dear Stella Colas waiting all this time! Well, with fifteen hundred admirers, at the very least, watching her every movement, and applauding her to the very echo, she can well afford to spare my oblique gaze. Did I like the French Juliet? Did I prefer her above Fanny Kemble, above Ellen Tree, above Helen Faucit? Well, she was very, very pretty. She dressed in excellent taste. She had one of the most sensible, polished, and gentlemanlike Romeos I ever desired to see,—

Mr. Walter Montgomery,-who, on his part, had a wonderful Apothecary in Mr. Belmore. She had an admirable Friar Lawrence in Mr. Henry Marston, one of the best actors on the English stage. And what else? Well, if the truth must out, I should have liked to witness Mademoiselle Stella Colas' impersonation of Juliet with a ball of cotton securely stuffed into each of my ears. Her pantomime was marvellous. She was full of grace, agility, intelligence, fascination; but I do not like to hear the words of Shakespeare murdered; and that she did so murder them— murdering even while she smiled-is a certainty. In this I may be hypercritical. Foreign tragedians, male and female, on the English boards have become the fashion. We have had a High-Dutch Hamlet. We have now had a French Juliet. I live in hopes of seeing a Spanish Ophelia, and a Cochin-Chinese Lady Macbeth.

Of Mademoiselle Stella Colas' astounding intensity of passionate grief, the critics have discoursed until they have become well-nigh as hoarse as the pretty French actress at the end of her screeds of woe. Said a very clever and a very witty lady who sat by my side in the stalls to me, "Of what does that last agony of anguish remind you?"

"Of Niobe, of Rachel, of Sappho, of the Pythoness, of Madge Wildfire," I answered heedlessly.

"Not at all," pursued my interlocutor. "Vous n'y êtes pas! Does not that appalling lament remind you somehow of a cat upon the tiles?" The lady was not an Englishwoman; and abroad, as you may know, it is the custom to call things by their names.

But she was a pretty creature. Oh! she was fair. I hope she filled Mr. George Vining's treasury to overflowing. I hope she will marry a Russian Grand- Duke at the very least; and when next Mr. Walter Montgomery plays Romeo, I trust he will be enabled to find another Juliet as comely and as graceful as Stella Colas. But I very much doubt it.

Lo! I hear the clatter of the crockery-ware on the stairs; and, for the last time, Crazy Jane brings me up my "Breakfast in Bed." For twelve months I have partaken of my morning meal on my back, and feebly philosophised between the sheets. But the year is out. I have grown to acknowledge that my lie-a-bed habits are highly deleterious, not to say immoral; and, for the future, I am sternly resolved to rise at seven o'clock, and have my tea and toast in a decent break fast-parlour punctually at eight. Good by, ladies and gentlemen; may your shadows and indigestions never be less Good by, Hircius and Spungius, engaging "Companions of my Solitude," inexhaustible themes for "Essays written in the intervals of Business." Farewell, my best-beloved; we may meet again, shortly. I take my leave with feelings of affection towards all the world,-feelings that o'erbrim my eyes and swell my bosom. What are riches, honours, dignities? Give me Heart! Bless every body!

Dwelling-houses in Munich.

FOR some time past the demand for houses in Munich has greatly exceeded the supply, and the usual consequences of an understocked market have arisen. Rents have increased out of all proportion to other prices; houseowners have grown insolent and tyrannical; speculators have run up bad buildings, and made ill-gotten gains which have prospered; and families have been at the mercy of all three. Moreover, the law in Munich is on the side of the owner, and the tenant has no possible redress. Now at last steps have been taken to create a much greater supply of lodgings, and to alter the iniquitous law against lodgers. But in the mean time let me sketch the state of dwelling-houses in Munich, and set down my own sad experience.

As in Continental towns generally, we inhabit floors. Much has been said for and against this system, to which Englishmen submit willingly enough in Paris and Rome, but which they consider unsuited to English notions in London. The houses in Victoria Street are pointed to as proof of this assertion, though the enormous rents demanded, the gloomy and low situation, are probably better reasons for their failure than any thing in the English character. Few even of the richer classes in Munich have a house to themselves, save in the case of people living in small houses beyond the limits of the actual town; and the majority of houses, both old and new, were built on the principle of separate floors. One inconvenience this system certainly possesses,-you cannot buy your own house. If you buy it, that is, you must buy other people's at the same time; from a tenant you must become a landlord. In the present defenceless state of tenants, they would be glad enough if each could buy his own floor; but few would care to rise suddenly into the onerous and detested position of landlord of a four-storied house, even if they could afford the outlay. But, with this disadvantage, the flat-system has many points superior to the ordinary English manner of building. Being all on the same floor, the rooms are almost invariably en suite, convenient as giving you a greater command over your space, a power of marshaling your rooms when you wish to receive company, and as enabling you to avoid cold passages. The multiplication of doors is perhaps an evil, especially when the primitive notions of Munich architects have led them to put the doors in the most inconvenient places. Moreover, as Alfred de Mussat has proved in one of his exquisite Proverbes, Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée; both of which alternatives are apt to be inconvenient. Again, the porte-cochère is an immense convenience, which ladies going out to balls or parties in the snow or the rain can perfectly appreciate. It has always been a wonder to me how a lady can come down those three steps that lead from the door of a London house to the street, through those open pillars that do not give the slightest