o an agency in an expensive street out of Piccadilly,
and there purchase a stall for the sum of eleven shillings. You receive
your ticket from the hands of a smooth, sleek, bottle-nosed clerk, who
seems for all the world as if he had stepped straight out of a volume
of Dickens or of Thackeray. There is almost always an old lady taking
seats for the play, with a heavy carriage in waiting at the door; the
number of old ladies whom one has to squeeze past in the stalls is in
fact very striking. "Is it good?" asks the old lady of the gentleman I
have described, with a very sweet voice and a perfectly expressionless
face. (She means the play, not the seat.) "It is thought very good, my
lady," says the clerk, as if he were uttering a "response" at church;
and my lady being served, I approach with my humbler petition. The
dearness of places at the London theatres is a sufficient indication
that play-going is not a popular amusement; three dollars is a high
price to pay for the privilege of witnessing any London performance
that I have seen. (One goes into the stalls of the Theatre Francais for
eight francs.) In the house itself everything seems to contribute to
the impression which I have tried to indicate--the impression that the
theatre in England is a social luxury and not an artistic necessity.
The white-cravatted young man who inducts you into your stall, and
having put you into possession of a programme, extracts from you,
masterly but effectually, the sixpence which, as a stranger, you have
wondered whether you might venture to give him, and which has seemed a
mockery of his grandeur--this excellent young man is somehow the
keynote of the whole affair. An English audience is as different as
possible from a French, though the difference is altogether by no means
to its disadvantage. It is much more "genteel"; it is less Bohemian,
less _blase_, more _naif_, and more respectful--to say nothing of being
made up of handsomer people. It is well dressed, tranquil, motionless;
it suggests domestic virtue and comfortable homes; it looks as if it
had come to the play in its own carriage, after a dinner of beef and
pudding. The ladies are mild, fresh colored English mothers; they all
wear caps; they are wrapped in knitted shawls. There are many rosy
young girls, with dull eyes and quiet cheeks--an element wholly absent
from Parisian audiences. The men are handsome and honorable looking;
they are in evening dress; they come with the