one another down its innocent nose. Those inscrutable pigeon-hole
offices, with nothing in them (not so much as an inkstand) but a
model of a theatre before the curtain, where, in the Italian Opera
season, tickets at reduced prices are kept on sale by nomadic
gentlemen in smeary hats too tall for them, whom one occasionally
seems to have seen on race-courses, not wholly unconnected with
strips of cloth of various colours and a rolling ball--those
Bedouin establishments, deserted by the tribe, and tenantless,
except when sheltering in one corner an irregular row of ginger-
beer bottles, which would have made one shudder on such a night,
but for its being plain that they had nothing in them, shrunk from
the shrill cries of the news-boys at their Exchange in the kennel
of Catherine-street, like guilty things upon a fearful summons. At
the pipe-shop in Great Russell-street, the Death's-head pipes were
like theatrical memento mori, admonishing beholders of the decline
of the playhouse as an Institution. I walked up Bow-street,
disposed to be angry with the shops there, that were letting out
theatrical secrets by exhibiting to work-a-day humanity the stuff
of which diadems and robes of kings are made. I noticed that some
shops which had once been in the dramatic line, and had struggled
out of it, were not getting on prosperously--like some actors I
have known, who took to business and failed to make it answer. In
a word, those streets looked so dull, and, considered as theatrical
streets, so broken and bankrupt, that the FOUND DEAD on the black
board at the police station might have announced the decease of the
Drama, and the pools of water outside the fire-engine maker's at
the corner of Long-acre might have been occasioned by his having
brought out the whole of his stock to play upon its last
smouldering ashes.