King and every body else crying him up so high," &c. Poor Sir William, he
must have been as much worried and vexed as Mr. Ebers with the Operatics,
or any Covent Garden manager, in our time; whose days and nights are not
very serene, although passed among the _stars_,

In one of Pepys's notices of Hart, he tells us "It pleased us mightily
to see the natural affection of a poor woman, the mother of one of the
children brought upon the stage; the child crying, she, by force, got upon
the stage, and took up her child, and carried it away off the stage from
Hart." This pleasant playgoer likewise says, in 1667-8, "when I began
first to be able to bestow a play on myself, I do not remember that I saw
so many by half of the ordinary prentices and mean people in the pit at
2_s_. 6_d_. a-piece as now; I going for several years no higher than the
12_d_. and then the 18_d_. places, though I strained hard to go in then
when I did; so much the vanity and prodigality of the age is to be
observed in this particular."

It may be at this moment interesting to mention that the first Covent
Garden Theatre was opened under the patent granted to Sir William Davenant
for the Dorset Gardens and Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatres. We must also
acknowledge our obligation for the preceding notes to the _Companion to
the Theatres_, a pretty little work which we noticed _en passant_ when
published, and which we now seasonably recommend to the notice of our
readers.

* * * * *


FOUR SONNETS.