Among the persons whom I used to see behind the scenes were two who, for different reasons, attracted my attention:  one was the Earl of W——­, and the other the Rev. A.F.  C——.  I was presented to Lord and Lady W——­ in society, and visited them more than once at their place near Manchester.  But before I had made Lord W——­’s acquaintance, he was an object of wondering admiration to me, not altogether unmixed with a slight sense of the ridiculous, only because it passed my comprehension how any real, live man could be so exactly like the description of a particular kind of man, in a particular kind of book.  There was no fault to find with the elegance of his appearance and his remarkable good looks; he certainly was the beau ideal of a dandy,—­with his slender, perfectly dressed figure, his pale complexion, regular features, fine eyes, and dark, glossy waves of hair, and the general aristocratic distinction of his whole person,—­and was so like the Earl of So-and-So, in the fashionable novel of the day, that I always longed to ask him what he did at the end of the “third volume,” and “whether he or Sir Reginald married Lady Geraldine.”  But why this exquisite par excellence should always have struck me as slightly absurd, I cannot imagine.  The Rev. A.F.  C——­ was the natural son of William IV. and Mrs. Jordan, and vicar of Maple Durham; when first I came out, this young gentleman attended every one of my performances, first in one of the stage boxes and afterward in a still nearer position to the stage, one of the orchestra reserved seats.  Thence, one night, he disappeared, and, to my surprise, I saw him standing at one of the side scenes during the whole play.  My mother remarking at supper his non-attendance in his usual place, my father said that he had come to him at the beginning of the play, and asked, for his mother’s sake, to be allowed occasionally to present himself behind the scenes.  My father said this reference to Mrs. Jordan had induced him to grant the request so put, though he did not think the back of the scenes a very proper haunt for a gentleman of his cloth.  There, however, Mr. F. C——­ came, and evening after evening I saw his light kid gloves waving and gesticulating about, following in a sort of sympathetic dumb show the gradual development of my distress, to the end of the play.  My father, at his request, presented him to me, but as I never remained behind the scenes or went into the green-room, and as he could not very well follow me upon the stage, our intercourse was limited to silent bows and courtesies, as I went on and off, to my palace in Verona, or from Friar Laurence’s cell.  Mr. F. C——­ appeared to me to have slightly mistaken his vocation:  that others had done so for him was made more manifest to me by my subsequent acquaintance with him.  I encountered him one evening at a very gay ball given by the Countess de S——.  Almost as soon as I came into the room he rushed at me, exclaiming, “Oh, do come and dance with me, that’s