in every piece performed in the course of the
evening. Rather than let them stand idly
at the wings, obstructing the business of the
stage, and forming an annoying lateral
audience to their acting companions, I
always make them useful in the front of
the curtain. How damaging it is to the
character of a theatre, when a gentleman
in one private box raises his eyes and sees
his box-keeper—the man to whom he has
just given a shilling for a place and a bill
—standing or sitting in the box immediately
opposite, peeping at the front of the
house round the box curtains, like a burglar
in ambush, and holding a bouquet in his
inexperienced hands, which, in a few moments,
he will level, with unsteady aim, at the principal
performer? Such rude preparations in
aid of the usual outburst of delight at the
close of a performance are unworthy of
theatrical management; unworthy ot a common
barn. They have no place in the beautfully
regulated Gloriosa Theatre.

That remarkably fine man, as the ladies
call him, in the big private box, whose blue
dress-coat with velvet collar, white waist-coat,
whiter necktie, and fine curly flaxen
wig, remind the audience of the once finest
gentleman in Europe, is not his Imperial
Highness the Grand Duke of Meddling-beggar
Seidlitz, as the profusion of brilliant
orders upon his slightly-exposed left
breast would seem to imply; but poor old
Hobbler, my third old man comedian, who
is past the regular business of the stage,
and earns his salary by sitting for aristocracy
in one or other of the empty boxes. Put
him in the hands of the best dresser in the
theatre (who alters his appearance every
night), let him be conducted, when ready, to
his allotted seat, and he does more good to
the treasury in this quiet way than he ever
would by gasping through a part upon the
stage. That tall thin man, in the small private
box, with the lofty brow, severe expression
of face, and a plain blue ribbon across his
breast, is a gentleman who has mistaken his
vocation as a light comedian, and, having
sense enough to see this, he is prevailed upon
to personate the form and aspect of over-wrought
ministers of state, who are reposing
from the cares of government by witnessing
my excellent comedies and farces. To-night
he is sitting for the Right Honourable the Earl
of Beerhousie; to-morrow he will, perhaps,
change his character for the Marquis of
Needham; and the next night he will appear
with a lady, whom I have engaged for the
purpose, as Lord and Lady Longwyndham.

That respectable middle-class looking gentleman
with his two sons, sitting in the front
of the dress-circle, and conversing loudly between
the acts upon the distinguished merits
of the pieces and the performers: that stout
lady in the upper boxes, who is obliged to be
held down in violent fits of laughter, several
times in the course of a farce; that genial
countryman in the centre of the pit, who
swears he will send up the whole of
Stoker-in-the-Marsh by excursion train to see the
comedy; and those half-dozen rough, red-faced
sons of toil in the gallery, who carry an
encore, or initiate a call, are all familiar
faces at the treasury of the Gloriosa Theatre,
every Saturday afternoon from one to two
o'clock.

Perfect as all this organisation seems, it is
not sufficient for me without the aid of machinery.
To rest entirely for support upon
human agencies, would be to go back a hundred
years in the progress of improvement;
and I have an ambition to be rather before
than behind my time. For this reason I have
invented a clapping machine, worked by an
engine of one-horse power, which stands
under the stage near the orchestra, and is
equal in its action to a thousand pairs of
human hands. It can be worked by a child,
or a call-boy, with a delightfully-regulated
crescendo and diminuendo movement; and it
never fails to carry a nagging audience after
it, like a flock of sheep following a sheep-bell.

It is not only before the curtain of the
Gloriosa Theatre that the influence of good
management is felt; but it extends behind it.
Half the troubles of managers arise in the
heart-burnings, the jealousies, the ill-regulated
ambition of actors. Every man wants
to play Hamlet; every woman Constance. I
take little heed of talent in my green-room—
I assume that to be equally divided—and in
the troublesome allotment of parts I am
governed almost entirely by weight. At one
end of the room, by the side of the pier glass,
is an unerring weighing machine, in which
every performer of my company is placed
every Saturday night, the individual results
being conspicuously registered in the apartment
for the ensuing week. A list of parts,
with their proper weights, is hung up by the
side of this document, so that any one may
compare them. I give an extract:

By this it is easily seen that if Mr. Firkin,
my aspiring tragedian, weighs thirteen stone,
he is completely shut out of the second of
these parts; and with regard to the first, no
sensible manager could rest quietly in a
theatre while young Alderman Romeo was
waddling about the stage.

If I had done nothing else with the Gloriosa
Theatre, I should still have obtained a
favourable notoriety by the philanthropic and
patriotic tone which I have imparted to the
house. I have permanently set aside two
large boxes; one for the sole gratuitous use
of any Greenwich-pensioners with one leg or
one arm; and the other for any Chelsea-pensioners