in action. I never felt so sure of anything I
had not seen as I am of Arthur Felton's having
come to serious grief."

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.

THE O. P. RIOTS.

THEATRICAL riots have not been unfrequent
in English theatres.

There was a great riot at the Portugal-street
Theatre in 1721, in Rich's time, when Quin and
his brother-actors flashed out their swords and
drove out the wild young rakes who had
threatened to pink the manager. There was a
great scuffle before this at the same house when,
wishing to insult the brazen Duchess of Portsmouth,
some tipsy gentlemen drew their blades
in the pit, and flung blazing flambeaux among
the actors on the stage.

There was the Footman's Riot in 1737, and
the prodigious mutiny, too, in Garrick's Drury
Lane, in 1754, about those foreign dancers. The
pit thrashed the boxes, jumped on the harpsichord,
broke up benches, slashed the scenery,
and pelted poor Davy's windows in Southampton-
street. And that terrible evening, also, at
the Haymarket, when thousands of enraged
tailors threatened to surge into the theatre to
prevent old Dowton playing "The Tailors, or a
Tragedy for Warm Weather." One of them was
actually bold enough, without even the help of
his eight partners, to fling a pair of heavy shears
at the great comedian. But as the minnow is
to the whale, so were all these popular effervescences
compared with those tremendous yet
ludicrous disturbances in 1809, which, for no
less than sixty-one nights, under the name of
the O. P. Riots, agitated London, divided
society, and convulsed Covent Garden.

The old Covent Garden Theatre had been burnt
down September 20, 1808, it was supposed by
the wadding of the musket of one of the
Spanish soldiers in Pizarro. Twenty persons
perished in trying to save the building.
Handel's organ, the wines of the Beef-Steak
Club, Munden's wardrobe, and Miss Bolton's
jewels, were all consumed. The new building
cost fifty thousand pounds, besides the
forty-four thousand five hundred pounds
insurance. The Duke of Northumberland
generously lent Kemble ten thousand pounds, and
sent him the receipt to burn on the day the
first stone was laid by the Prince of Wales and
the Freemasons, of whom the "ne'er-do-weel"
was grand master. Mr. Robert Smirke, jun.,
built the new theatre to resemble the great
Doric temple of Minerva on the Acropolis.
The roof was one hundred feet long and one
hundred and thirty feet wide. The pit had
its old twenty benches. The chief obnoxious
novelty was that the third tier of boxes, letting
for twelve thousand pounds a year, had small
ante-rooms opening into a saloon reserved at three
hundred pounds a year each for annual renters
only. This especially exasperated the
democratic town. A person seated in the back row
of the two-shilling gallery was eighty-six feet
from the stage door; in the upper gallery the
spectator was one hundred and four feet distant.
The house was lit by glass chandeliers in front of
each circle, two hundred and seventy wax-
candles a night being consumed, while the
stage and scenery had their three hundred
patent lamps. The prevailing colour of the
house was white; the ornaments gold on a
light pink ground. So far so good, but no
further.

The season of 1808 had been a specially
interesting one. Miss Pope, "the chambermaid"
par excellence for fifty years, had retired. In
the same month, Madame Storace, the
unapproachable buffa of English opera and musical
farce, had also taken her leave; and soon
after, Mrs. Mattocks, for nearly sixty years
the gayest of stage widows, and the most
inimitable of M'Tabs, had made her final curtsey.
In the mean time, the management had not
been idle. They had got Liston, that fine
farceur, as a comic dancer, and Young for
nervous tragedy; Incledon for noble sea songs;
Munden for extravagant drollery; and Fawcett
for harsh comic force. The other house, burnt
down in 1808, had no one but Mrs. Jordan on
whom to rely. Mrs. Dickons was also a
favourite with the Covent Garden public for
good sound acting; and, above all, not to
mention the grace and majesty of Mrs. Siddons,
there was that cheval de bataille, that beautiful
Roman lady, Madame Catalani, with a voice that
could follow a flute through all its ripplings, and
a violin through all its windings.

John Philip Kemble, the son of a Staffordshire
manager, was born in 1757, and had made
his first appearance on the London boards as
Hamlet, in 1783. He had been the sovereign
idol of the public, and hitherto had reigned
supreme in their favour. Age had not yet made
him hard, dry, cold, nor pedantic, as that fine
critic, Hazlitt, afterwards thought him. Kean's
thunder-storm of passionate genius had not yet
shaken old Drury to its centre.

The town was menacingly silent. The young
men in the public offices (great theatre-goers)
alone openly denounced the new prices, the
boxes being raised from six shillings to seven
shillings, the pit from three shillings and sixpence
to four shillings, the galleries alone being left at
their former rates of two shillings and one
shilling. The extension of aristocratic and
exclusive privileges, the new ante-rooms where
the Phrynes, Chloës, and Aspasias of the day
would flaunt their newly acquired finery,
especially irritated the virtuous town. The
Tory papers advocated the new prices, the
Whig papers, without exception, the old.
Advertisements, letters, and paragraphs, urging
combination and resistance, had appeared long
before the fatal day of opening. London was
ripe for a theatrical mutiny.

Mr. Kemble, proud as Coriolanus, and
conscious of the enormous outlay of the proprietors
that had compelled the temporary high prices,
was defiant and confident. On the morning of the