when she visits the theatre in
state, fourteen boxes in the centre of the house, overlooking the back
of the pit, are opened into one, involving a large amount of expense
and trouble, which, however, is no doubt amply compensated by the
extraordinary receipts of the night.

A private and separate entrance is not the exclusive privilege of
royalty. The Duke of Bedford, as ground-landlord, and Miss Burdett
Coutts, who has likewise a box in perpetual freehold, have separate
entrances, just under that of the Queen's box, with drawing-rooms
attached, which are small and low-roofed, but sumptuously fitted up.
Such were the principal objects appertaining to the audience part of
the house.

Returning behind the scenes, the two principal public rooms are the
manager's room and green-room, which both suggested recollections of
old Covent Garden in its British drama-days. Unlike the audience part
of the theatre, which has been entirely reconstructed, the stage part
has only been refurnished--and yet not entirely refurnished--for in
this very manager's room, where John Kemble used to play the potentate
off the stage with as much dignity as on it, stands a clock with the
following inscription: 'After the dreadful fire of Covent Garden
Theatre, on the morning of September the 21st 1808, this clock was dug
out of the ruins by John Saul, master-carpenter of the theatre, and
repaired and set to work.' When we reached the green-room itself, what
recollections crowded on me of the stars that glittered around the
Kemble dynasty! In Costa, seated at the pianoforte, I saw the face of
an honest man, who unites dogged British perseverance and energy with
the Italian sense of the beautiful in art. A feeling of regret,
however, came over me, to think that our British school of dramatic
representation and dramatic literature, which dawned brightly under
Elizabeth, and in the eighteenth century was associated with
everything distinguished in polite letters and polite society, should
have become all but extinct. But this feeling was momentary, when I
reflected that our sense of the beautiful, including the good and the
true, had not diminished, but had merely gone into new channels; and,
more especially, that Meyerbeer and Rossini, in order to hear their
own incomparable works executed in perfection, must come to the city
which the Exhibition of last year has indelibly stamped as the capital
of the civilised world.

NUMBER TWELVE.

W