The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run up against one of these blind-alley themes.

The oak-crowned sisters, and their chaste-eyed queen, Satyrs, and sylvan boys, were seen, Peeping from forth their alleys green; Brown Exercise rejoiced to hear; And Sport leaped up, and seized his beechen spear.

"I suppose burglars are abroad on nights like this," and he quietly relocked the alley-gate.

The captain had youth on his side, and, diving into the narrow alley-ways that constitute the older portion of Wood-hatch, he moderated his pace and listened acutely.

O, the garden I remember, In the gay and sunny spring, When our laughter made the thickets And the arching alleys ring!

The impression grew upon him that he was being handled with tongs, along back-alley routes; that he and his race were something to be kept out of sight as much as possible, as careful housekeepers manoeuver their slops.

Underneath was printed in the same large red letters as those which adorned the outside of the envelope: BE DOWN ON THE DOCK AT SUNDOWN WITHOUT FAIL PREPARED TO UNDERGO THE ORDEAL WHICH ALL DWELLERS IN THE ALLEY MUST SUFFER BEFORE BEING WELCOMED INTO THE INNER CIRCLE OF ALLEY SPIRITS.

BLIND-ALLEY THEMESAND

The Rose-alley ambuscade became almost proverbial; and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, mentions the circumstance in his "Art of Poetry;" with a cold and self-sufficient complacent sneer: "Though praised and punished for another's rhymes, His own deserve as great applause sometimes.

He wondered if the old man would succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish beggars and thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce freedom.

You starved alley cat!"

God help the poor, who in this wintry morn, Come forth of alleys dim and courts obscure; God help yon poor, pale girl, who droops forlorn, And meekly her affliction doth endure!

Worse still is another class of blind-alley occupation.