by a series of immense, stupid, square pilasters, such as architecture
has seldom witnessed out of Russia. Over these pilasters stands
the first row of boxes supported by beautifully wrought Corinthian
columns, and above these rise three additional rows. The edifice is
about 160 feet high and is the most colossal building in Warsaw. As it
was designed to treat the actors in military fashion and according to
Russian style, the building was laid out like barracks and about seven
hundred persons live in it, most of them employed about the theater.
The two stages were built by a German architect under the inspection
of the General whose peremptory suggestions were frequent and
injurious. Both the great theater as it is called, which has four
rows of boxes, and can contain six thousand auditors, and the Varieté
theater which is very much smaller, are fitted out with all sorts of
apparatus that ever belonged to a stage. In fact, new machinery has
in many cases been invented for them and proved totally useless. The
Russian often hits upon queer notions when he tries to show his gifts.

On one side a very large and strong bridge has been erected leading
from the street to the stage, to be used whenever the piece requires
large bodies of cavalry to make their appearance, and there are
machines that can convey persons with the swiftness of lightning down
from the sky above the stage, a distance of 56 feet. A machine for
which a ballet has been composed surpasses everything I ever saw in
its size; it serves to transport eighty persons together on a seeming
cloud from the roof to the foot-lights. I was astonished by it when I
first beheld it although I had seen the machines of the grand opera at
Paris: the second time I reflected that it alone cost 40,000 florins
[$16,000].

Under the management of two Russian Generals, who have hitherto been