his sense of the responsibility upon him. to
make the best of his audience, and to do his
best for them, is a highly agreeable sign of these
times.

As the spectators at this theatre, for a reason
I will presently show, were the object of my
journey, I entered on the play of the night as
one of the two thousand and odd hundreds, by
looking about me at my neighbours. We were
a motley assemblage of people, and we had a
good many boys and young men among us; we
had also many girls and young women. To
represent, however, that we did not include
a very great number, and a very fair proportion,
of family groups, would be to make a gross
misstatement. Such groups were to be seen in all
parts of the house; in the boxes and stalls
particularly, they were composed of persons of very
decent appearance, who had many children with
them. Among our dresses there were most,
kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much
fustian and corduroy that was neither sound nor
fragrant. The caps of our young men were
mostly of a limp character, and we who wore
them, slouched, high-shouldered, into our places
with our hands in our pockets, and occasionally
twisted our cravats about our necks like eels, and
occasionally tied them down our breasts like
links of sausages, and occasionally had a screw
in our hair over each cheek-bone with a slight
Thief-flavour in it. Besides prowlers and idlers,
we were mechanics, dock-labourers, coster-
mongers, petty tradesmen, small clerks,
milliners, stay-makers, shoe-binders, slop workers,
poor workers in a hundred highways and bye-
ways. Many of us—on the whole, the majority
—were not at all clean, and not at all choice in
our lives or conversation. But we had all come
together in a place where our convenience was
well consulted, and where we were well looked
after, to enjoy an evening's entertainment in
common. We were not going to lose any part
of what we had paid for, through anybody's
caprice, and as a community we had a character
to lose. So we were closely attentive, and kept
excellent order, and let the man or boy who
did otherwise instantly get out from this place,
or we would put him out with the greatest
expedition.

We began at half-past six with a pantomime
—with a pantomime so long, that before it was
over I felt as if I had been travelling for six
weeks—going to India, say, by the Overland
Mail. The Spirit of Liberty was the principal
personage in the Introduction, and the Four
Quarters of the World came out of the globe,
glittering, and discoursed with the Spirit, who
sang charmingly. We were delighted to
understand that there was no Liberty anywhere but
among ourselves, and we highly applauded the
agreeable fact. In an allegorical way, which
did as well as any other way, we and the Spirit
of Liberty got into a kingdom of Needles and
Pins, and found them at war with a potentate
who called in to his aid their old arch-enemy
Rust, and who would have got the better of
them if the Spirit of Liberty had not in the nick
of time transformed the leaders into Clown,
Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, Harlequina,
and a whole family of Sprites, consisting of a
remarkably stout father and three spineless sons.
We all knew what was coming, when the Spirit
of Liberty addressed the king with the big face,
and His Majesty backed to the side-scenes and
began untying himself behind, with his big face
all on one side. Our excitement at that crisis
was great, and our delight unbounded. After
this era in our existence, we went through all
the incidents of a pantomime; it was not by
any means a savage pantomime in the way of
burning or boiling people, or throwing them out
of window, or cutting them up; was often very
droll, was always liberally got up, and cleverly
presented. I noticed that the people who kept
the shops, and who represented the passengers
in the thoroughfares and so forth, had no
conventionality in them, but were unusually like the
real thing—from which I infer that you may
take that audience in (if you wish to) concerning
Knights and Ladies, Fairies, Angels, or such
like, but that they are not to be done as to
anything in the streets. I noticed, also, that when
two young men, dressed in exact imitation of
the eel-and-sausage-cravated portion of the
audience, were chased by policemen, and, finding
themselves in danger of being caught,
dropped so suddenly as to oblige the policemen
to tumble over them, there was great rejoicing
among the caps—as though it were a delicate
reference to something they had heard of before.

The Pantomime was succeeded by a Melo-
Drama. Throughout the evening, I was pleased
to observe Virtue quite as triumphant as she
usually is out of doors, and indeed I thought
rather more so. We all agreed (for the time)
that honesty was the best policy, and we were
as hard as iron upon Vice, and we wouldn't
hear of Villany getting on in the world—no,
not upon any consideration whatever.

Between the pieces, we almost all of us went
out and refreshed. Many of us went the length
of drinking beer at the bar of the neighbouring
public-house, some of us drank spirits, crowds
of us had sandwiches and ginger-beer at the
refreshment-bars established for us in the Theatre.
The sandwich—as substantial as was consistent
with portability, and as cheap as possible—we
hailed as one of our greatest institutions. It
forced its way among us at all stages of the
entertainment, and we were always delighted to
see it; its adaptability to the varying moods of
our nature was surprising; we could never
weep so comfortably as when our tears fell on
our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily
as when we choked with sandwich; Virtue
never looked so beautiful or Vice so deformed
as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to
consider what would come of that resolution of
Wickedness in boots, to sever Innocence in
flowered chintz from Honest Industry in
striped stockings. When the curtain fell for
the night, we still fell back upon sandwich, to
help us through the rain and mire, and home to
bed.