been obliged to leave them when I have made an uncommercial journey
expressly to look on. The air of this Theatre was fresh, cool, and
wholesome. To help towards this end, very sensible precautions had
been used, ingeniously combining the experience of hospitals and
railway stations. Asphalt pavements substituted for wooden floors,
honest bare walls of glazed brick and tile--even at the back of the
boxes--for plaster and paper, no benches stuffed, and no carpeting
or baize used; a cool material with a light glazed surface, being
the covering of the seats.

These various contrivances are as well considered in the place in
question as if it were a Fever Hospital; the result is, that it is
sweet and healthful. It has been constructed from the ground to
the roof, with a careful reference to sight and sound in every
corner; the result is, that its form is beautiful, and that the
appearance of the audience, as seen from the proscenium--with every
face in it commanding the stage, and the whole so admirably raked
and turned to that centre, that a hand can scarcely move in the
great assemblage without the movement being seen from thence--is
highly remarkable in its union of vastness with compactness. The
stage itself, and all its appurtenances of machinery, cellarage,
height and breadth, are on a scale more like the Scala at Milan, or
the San Carlo at Naples, or the Grand Opera at Paris, than any
notion a stranger would be likely to form of the Britannia Theatre
at Hoxton, a mile north of St. Luke's Hospital in the Old-street-
road, London. The Forty Thieves might be played here, and every
thief ride his real horse, and the disguised captain bring in his
oil jars on a train of real camels, and nobody be put out of the
way. This really extraordinary place is the achievement of one
man's enterprise, and was erected on the ruins of an inconvenient