old building in less than five months, at a round cost of five-and-
twenty thousand pounds. To dismiss this part of my subject, and
still to render to the proprietor the credit that is strictly his
due, I must add that his sense of the responsibility upon him to
make the best of his audience, and to do his best for them, is a
highly agreeable sign of these times.

As the spectators at this theatre, for a reason I will presently
show, were the object of my journey, I entered on the play of the
night as one of the two thousand and odd hundreds, by looking about
me at my neighbours. We were a motley assemblage of people, and we
had a good many boys and young men among us; we had also many girls
and young women. To represent, however, that we did not include a
very great number, and a very fair proportion of family groups,
would be to make a gross mis-statement. Such groups were to be
seen in all parts of the house; in the boxes and stalls
particularly, they were composed of persons of very decent
appearance, who had many children with them. Among our dresses
there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian
and corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant. The caps of our
young men were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them,
slouched, high-shouldered, into our places with our hands in our
pockets, and occasionally twisted our cravats about our necks like
eels, and occasionally tied them down our breasts like links of
sausages, and occasionally had a screw in our hair over each cheek-
bone with a slight Thief-flavour in it. Besides prowlers and
idlers, we were mechanics, dock-labourers, costermongers, petty
tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, stay-makers, shoe-binders,
slop-workers, poor workers in a hundred highways and byways. Many
of us--on the whole, the majority--were not at all clean, and not