donné la peîne de naitre," says Figaro to
Coitut Alma viva, in the play. To be K.G.'d,
you must take the trouble to be born of the
K.G. caste.

But envy, avaunt! Social fate is not
without its compensations, and there are
stalls and stalls. Lend me a guinea, and
for a whole evening, from eight to nearly
midnight, I can sit supreme in a stall,
solitary, grand, absolute; for who shall dare
to turn me out? The stall is mine, to have
and to hold corporeally until the curtain
has fallen on the last tableau of the ballet,
and (in imagination at least) I can hang my
banner and my casque over my stall, and
deem myself a high, mighty, and puissant
prince. As the process, put into practice,
might interfere with the comfort of the
patrons of the Royal Italian Opera, I
content myself with hanging my overcoat
over the back of my stall, and placing my
collapsible Gibus beneath it. I notice a
large party of beautiful dames and damsels,
in a box on the pit tier, who, I am vain
enough to think, are intently inspecting
me through their opera-glasses. I plume
myself. I pull down my wristbands, I
smooth my shirt-front, and caress the bows
of my cravat. I turn the favourite facet
of my diamond ring well on to the box
on the pit tier. If you are the sun, shall
you not shine? I am taken, I fondly
hope, for one of the Upper Ten. I am
aware, from eyesight acquaintance with
the aristocracy, that my neighbour on the
right, with the purple wig, the varnished
pumps, and the ear trump, is Field Marshal
Lord Viscount Dumdum, that great Indian
hero; and that the yellow-faced little man
on my left, with the yellow ribbon at his
button-hole, is the Troglodyte ambassador.
Behind me is Sir Hercules Hoof, of the
Second Life Guards. In front of me is the
broad back— I wish, in respect to the back,
that it wasn't quite so broad— of Mr. Bargebeam,
Q.C. How are that family in the
pit tier to know that I am not a nobleman,
a diplomatist, a guardsman, or a Queen's
Counsel? I am clean. I had my hair dyed
the day before yesterday. My boots are
polished, my neckcloth is starched stiff:
my stall is as big as anybody else's. How
is beauty in the boxes to tell that I came
in (maybe) with an order.

The playhouse stall is a thoroughly
modern innovation, and even the pit of the
Italian theatres of the Renaissance was
destitute of seats. When Sterne first visited
the opera in Paris, the groundlings stood to
witness the performance, and sentinels with
fixed bayonets were posted to appease
tumults, as in the well-known case quoted in
the " Sentimental Journey," when the irate
dwarf threatened to cut off the pigtail of
the tall German. I am old enough to
remember when the pittites in the Scala
at Milan stood. You paid, I think, an
Austrian florin—one and eightpence—for bare
admission to the house, and then you took
your chance of lighting upon some lady
who would invite you to a seat in her box;
or some bachelor acquaintance who, having
had enough of the performance, would
surrender to you his reserved seat, near
the orchestra, for the rest of the evening.
Seated pits have always been common in
English theatres, owing to the strong
determination 'of the people to make
themselves comfortable whenever it was possible
to do so; and these reserved seats of
the Scala were the beginning of the
exclusive seats we call stalls. They are not
older than the era of the dominion of the
Austrians in Lombardy, after the downfall
of Napoleon the First. There were many
Milanese nobles not wealthy enough to take
boxes for the season, and too proud to
spunge on their friends every evening for
a back seat in a "palco," and, too patriotic
to mingle in the standing-up area with the
Austrian officers who, according to garrison
regulations, were admitted to the Scala at
the reduced price of ninepence halfpenny.
So the manager of the Scala hit upon the
crafty device of dividing the rows of benches
near the orchestra, into compartments, each
wide enough to accommodate a single
person, and the seats of which could be turned
up as in the choir of a cathedral. Moreover,
these seats were neatly fitted with hasps
and padlocks, so that the subscriber could
lock up his seat when, between the acts,
he strolled into the caffè for refreshment.
Perhaps he was absent from Milan during
the whole operatic season; and, if he did
not choose to lend the key of his stall to a
friend of the right political way of thinking,
the seat remained inexorably closed.
The system had a triple charm: First,
the subscriber could revel to the fullest
extent in the indulgence of that dog-
in-the-manger-like selfishness, which I
have held to be inseparably connected
with stall-holding; next, he could baffle the
knavish boxkeepers, with whom in an
Italian theatre you can always drive an
immoral bargain, and by a trifling bribe secure
a better seat than that for which you have
originally paid; finally he could obviate the
possibility of his stall being contaminated