at departure: They therefore, in succession, received the money and checked themselves; and were enabled, literally, to give bread to the starving. They obtained, at the same theatre, three nights more from Mr. Taylor's liberality; but on the 11th of April, they opened at the Lyceum, and continued, by permission of the Lord Chamberlain, to act there to the 10th of June. The six nights at the Opera-house had the distinction given by the talents of Mrs. Siddons, on the Sd of April, in Lady Randolph, and on the 10th by those of Madame Catalani, in Semiramide. On the latter occasion, there was an overflow that swept away all bars and bolts, and checks and their receivers. The charity of the public, to hear Madame Catalani, on this occasion, is said, in very numerous instances, to have forgotten the usual donation at the door.

It only remains for me to state that, upon some remarkable depreciation in the 5007. shares of this theatre after the fire, the unfortunate holders being contented to take whatever they could get--a public advertisement, from the PROPRIETORS, recommended them to be cool; and to be assured, that every endeavour towards a just and equitable arrangement with them would precede any attempt towards rebuilding the theatre. Some of them, I believe, became quite cold before that astonishing event.

*

CHAPTER VII.

Building of the New Theatre.-Its exterior.--Remarks.--Interior.--Threatened storm as to new prices.--The O. P. riot. The dinner.--The stage.-Termination of the contest.

FROM the destruction of the one theatre the mind recovers something of its elasticity in contemplating the rapid erection of the other. The excavations for the foundation began about the end of November. The last day of the year witnessed the ceremony of laying the foundation stone, and the whole building was finished on the 18th of September, 1809.

To accomplish this rapid task with the security that was equally essential in the work, horse-mills were erected to grind the lime and prepare the mortar-that, too, was used immediately in a hot ståte, to prevent any interruption from frost, and courses of Yorkshire stone, at every interval of four feet in height, were worked into the walls, to render them sufficiently strong.

The whole of the roof, by the dexterous employment of machinery, was raised and fixed in one month; it was nearly 100 feet in length, and 130 feet in width; every principal pair of rafters sustained, by calculation, a weight of 50 tons.

The outside of the theatre rests upon an area of about 220 feet in length, and 170 in breadth. The only insulation that merits the name is on the eastern side, Bow-street, and the western of Prince's Place. A fire in Hart-street, with a north wind to assist it, must do great injury to the theatre, even if they were speedily supplied with water. The Bedford avenue is gloomy, and would be ineffectual as to danger from the south.

There is, externally, not a particle of taste--a heavy portico of four doric columns, the largest in any modern building. astonishes by its ponderous inutility; the columns are 5 feet 6 inches in diameter. The doric, it should be observed, was the earliest of the three orders properly Grecian—the enormous thickness of the column diminished with the refinement of art, and the accomplished Corinthian consummated the invention of the Greeks.

We are told that the Bow-street front is an imitation of the Temple of Minerva in the Acropolis. Partially it may be; but it has no interior columns--no point of sight from which it can be viewed, or its proportions discerned. The lower part of the building is of stone, the upper of cement very dingy, and liable to scale off or crack. Referring to the archetype, the ornaments on the tympanum and frieze are omitted, so are those on the corners of the pediment.

Men are so liable to be carried away by a catch-word ;--mention freedom, and they seem to think all curb unnecessary. Talk of the classic, and they do not think of utility, and never ask even whether theatres, among the ancients, bore the external form of temples. Here every thing was consequently to be classical. The greater part of the bas reliefs in front are quite unintelligible, except to the artist and the antiquary ---Minerva, the Muses, Apollo, Bacchus, the Eumenides-Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Even the modern drama has too much classic tendency-for Milton is our epic, not dramatic, wonder, and Comus and Agonistes belong to the Grecian drama.

It is true we have Shakspeare in the employment of his preternatural power; he calls forth the inhabitants of his enchanted Isle; but would himself probably wonder that the triformed Hecate, in her car drawn by oxen, followed by Lady Macbeth with the daggers, and her husband turning away from the murdered Duncan, should be the sole evidences of the English genius for the STAGE; and he might now venture to inquire whether all his comedies had perished; and if they had, whether nothing of BEN JONSON, or FLETCHER, or MASSINGER Survived, to fill so great a chasm? One might suppose him to imagine, that even the successors of our greatest dramatists merited some place among the reliefs of an English theatre; and that DRYDEN, and CONGREVE, and FARQUHAR and VANBRUGH, as they could fill the interior occasionally, merited some little attention on the outside of an English play-house.

As to the two Muses of the drama, MELPOMENE, though not discriminated as to attitude from the common figure of Melancholy, he would, perhaps, think sufficiently attributed: the other figure, with the shepherd's crook, or pedum, on her right shoulder, he might refer to his classical friend BEN; and upon being assured by him, that all was correct with a gracious smile of deference, contentedly receive it for co

MEDY.

The halls and stair-cases of this theatre, its lobbies and saloons, are really wretched, when compared with the con

trivances of Wyatt at Drury Lane; and to allow such a clownish exhibition as the long unmeaning figure, called Shakspeare, to remain where it stands a single might, proves nothing, but that the managers of the house must pass always by it as rapidly as the people do.

In speaking of it as a playhouse, its highest excellence was the stage itself. constructed by Mr. Saul; certainly the most perfect with which I am acquainted. In the audience part of the building some positive improvements claim to be stated.

The boxes were calculated to hold as many people as they did in the former theatre; only, from the encroachment of the private circle, now occupying the whole of the third tier, 140 persons were accommodated in the lower circles. Six feet six inches were now the average depth of the three rows, which had been only six feet three inches in the old theatre, and but six feet in Drury Lane.

The pit had still its former twenty seats, but the declivity, instead of being, as formerly, only three feet, was now four feet nine inches.

In the two-shilling gallery of Drury Lane, a person seated in the back row was one hundred feet from the stage door; in the old Covent Garden he was eighty-eight feet, and in the present only eighty-six. In the upper gallery these relative distances were one hundred and four feet, ninety-three feet, and eighty-five feet.

The house was lighted by glass chandeliers in front of each circle-270 wax-candles was the nightly supply: 300 patent lamps lighted the stage and its scenery. The prevailing colour of the house was white; the ornament, gold upon a light pink ground; the box doors were all of solid mahogany.

The first and second circles of the boxes were appropriated to the public. From the third circle they were entirely excluded--the boxes here were let annually, and each of them had a small anti-room about six feet wide, opening outwards into a general saloon, appropriated to these renters, as that below was to the public. To these boxes the entrances were private.

In a commercial concern, like the building of a new theatre, men who bring forward a large capital, or what is the same thing, burthen themselves with a long and heavy debt, may be excused for any sanguine hope of reimbursement arising out of an invidious and dangerous distinction. The annual property in boxes at the Opera, is tolerated for the comfort of those who alone are competent to such an enjoyment but even there no separation exists from the public at

large-whoever pays at the pit-door, may then range at will among the circles of our nobility, whose boxes only contain the requisite number of chairs, without anti-rooms, which fancy can fill with profligacy unseen, and without what was really an objection, (for the immorality was a pretence,) the absolute seclusion of a PRIVILEGED ORDER from all vulgar

contact.

The necessity of the actors, who had been burnt out of the rival theatre, had led them to ask 7s. for their boxes in the Opera-house for six representations-it was given by the public cheerfully and graciously. A critical friend of mine expressed a hope, "that this would not be drawn into a precedent." The proprietors of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, demonstrated that they could only be reimbursed for their enormous outlay, by a rise in the prices, which would place the boxes at seven shillings, the pit at four, leaving the still far distant galleries at the old rates of two shillings and one.

Enough had transpired of their intentions to excite a vast deal of displeasure among our young men, who commonly use the theatres as their evening relaxation. My professional habits at this time led me to be almost daily in the public offices; where, as a man of business, who had once written for the stage, and whose intimacy with Mr. Kemble was well known, many very respectable persons in those offices would frequently exceed the usual official intercourse, and ask my opinions relative to the theatre and its concerns.

I found that a great proportion of their body was decidedly opposed to the new scheme; and I saw a prospect of annoy ance, such as made me tremble for my friends. I told Mr. Kemble what I knew; but he smiled at my terrors-and so late as two o'clock on the day of opening, I saw him in Bowstreet, quite perpendicular and confident, with a heap of papers under his arm, which he was himself going to deliver at the offices of our journals; the feelings of which, as might be imagined, referred to politics rather than to plays-the tory newspapers advocating the new prices, and the whig or radical invariably the old.

On the 18th of September, the new theatre, which had been completely finished within nine months, opened with Macbeth, the most attractive tragedy of Shakspeare, and the musical farce of The Quaker.

A slight advance in the price of admission had been announced in the play-bills, and adequately justified by the proprietors. To obviate a clamour, which assigned the engagement of Madame Catalani as the cause of this advance.