Philip Astley, and was opened in 1773, burnt in 1794; rebuilt 1795, burnt 1803; rebuilt 1804, burnt June 8, 1841, within two hours, the house being principally constructed from old ship-timber. It was rebuilt, and opened April 17, 1843, and has since been enlarged. There is only one other theatre in London for equestrianism; and the stud of trained horses numbers from fifty to sixty.

Philip Astley, originally a cavalry soldier, commenced horsemanship in 1763, in an open field at Lambeth. He built his first theatre partly with £60, the produce of an unowned diamond ring which he found on Westminster Bridge. Andrew Ducrow, subsequently proprietor of the Amphitheatre, was born at the Nag's Head, Borough, in 1793, when his father, Peter Ducrow, a native of Bruges, was "the Flemish Hercules" at Astley's. The fire in 1841 arose from ignited wadding, such as caused the destruction of the old Globe Theatre in 1613, and Covent Garden Theatre in 1808. Andrew Ducrow died January 26, 1842, of mental derangement and paralysis, produced by the above catastrophe.

Covent Garden theatre is the second one built on its site, -it being a strange fact that nearly all the theatres in London have been burnt down from time to time. It was here that the "O. P.," or "Old Prices," riots took place in 1804, and continued for seventy-seven nights, the management having made an attempt to raise the prices, but at last they had to back down before the popular storm. Incledon, Charles Kemble, Mrs. Glover, George Frederick Cooke, Miss O'Neill, Macready, Farren, Fanny Kemble, Adelaide Kemble and Edmund Kean have strutted their brief hours on its stage, but now the house is entirely devoted to opera.

Drury Lane Theatre, or "Old Drury," as it is sometimes known, and was at one time called the "Wilderness" by Mrs. Siddons, is situated in one of the lowest quarters of London, where vice, crime, poverty and drunkenness abound, but still it is frequented by the best classes of the play-going public. Here, one night in August, 1869, I saw "Formosa" played to a very full house, the excitement about the IIarvard and Oxford race

A GIN PUBLIC IN THE NEW CUT.

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having culminated about this time. It was then under the direction of Mr. Dion Boucicault, who has made and lost two or three fortunes in the management of theatres. All the famous disciples of the histrionic art who live in English dramatic history, have appeared during the last two hundred years on the boards of Old Drury.

In 1799 sixteen persons were trodden to death in an alarm which took place at the Haymarket theatre.

There is a little theatre called the Adelphi, in the Strand, near Cecil street where I had rooms for some time, and this little dirty theatre, which has a vestibule like the entrance to a New York lager bier saloon, has been very much frequented by Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. This royal lady has some queer tastes, and among them is a fondness for broad farce or low comedy. She is also fond of the piano, which she learned from a Mrs. Anderson, and sometimes when she plays she likes to be accompanied by two or three of the most distinguished violinists that can be procured. The Queen used to sing, and in the old days, when the world was new to her and before she had been widowed, it was the custom at the nice little private parties which she gave, to have Prince Albert sing with her, while the Hon. Mrs. Grey, wife of her Secretary (and a lady who had a good deal of work in helping to compose the Queen's memoirs), performed on the piano.

In every place of 'amusement in London, be it high or low, there is a place set apart for the Queen's family, so that should she take a notion to visit the most out of the way place, she may be certain of being able to secure a secluded nook or loge where she will not be intruded upon.

In the vicinity of all the theatres of the lower grade in and about London, I found nests of cheap public houses or drinking bars, and toward nine or ten o'clock, while the performances are at the height of dramatic agony, these resorts are crowded, with persons of both sexes, who have slipped out of the amusement halls to get a pint of beer or "tuppence" worth of "gin neat." Gin "neat" is gin without water or sugar, and this drink is very popular among women of the lowest class in London.

In Waterloo Road, close upon the Victoria theatre, I saw one of these "gin publics," the doors of which were choked with customers passing in and out from the adjoining theatre. There were negrocs, Malays and Chinamen, with an overflowing majority of Cockneys, in the "public," all of whom were

busily engaged in assuaging their thirst, or firing up their stomach furnaces. Not a little puzzled was I, to see women with small children in their arms, drinking alongside of sooty coal-bargemen-negroes, and young children, who had been driven by their miserable parents to beg coppers wherewith to

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procure them gin. It was a dreadful scene to witness, and the smiling fiend behind the bar was positively fat and enjoying the haggardness in some of his customers' faces.

I had been told that there was a theatre on the Surrey side of the river, in which, if I visited it, I might find all the unwashed elements of the London democracy at home, and one evening I found myself before its door, after a long journey.

This was the "Royal Victoria Theatre," New Cut, Lambeth. The Bowery, in its palmiest and most glorious days, could not hold a candle to this histrionic temple. Its tragedies and dramas of the highway robber and George Barnewell apprentice school are not, perhaps, to be equaled in any theatre in the world. The Porte St. Martin, in Paris, is a mere training-school of horror compared with this, the most bloodthirsty of places of amusement. There were two entrancesone for the aristocracy of Lambeth, the other for the underfed plough-holders, or, rather, for the Costermongers. The aristocratic entrance had a dark, dirty box-office, illumined by a pair of gas-jets that could hardly find air to flutter in, so strong was the stench of men and filthy materialism.

Over the door of the box-office was a sign, "Pit, 6d.; gallery, 3d.; private stage boxes, 2s." The crowds pushed hard and fast to get an entrance. They came in swarms of fustian and corduroys, with unkempt hair, the bosoms of some of the costerwomen almost laid bare with the shoving and crushing; the lads and men wearing heavy hob-nailed shoes, such shoes as are never seen in America excepting on the feet of emigrants, who stream through the gates of Castle Garden from the waste of Atlantic waters-and these heavy hob-nailed shoes did wonders in hurrying the progress of the front ranks, by repeated applications to the calves and ankles of those who had the good or bad luck to stand nearest the door of the theatre.

After a severe struggle, in which some greasy corduroys are ripped and several caps lost, and a number of babies squeezedwho are in the arms of girls hardly old enough, one would think, to be their lawful mothers—we get clear of the mob, shouting, screaming, and whistling, and pass up the dirty, rickety

stairs to the three-penny Gallery of the "Vic," as the theatre is called by the class who frequent it; and now a sight presents itself to the writer such as is seldom seen, and never in any city but London.

I lost my hat on the stairs, and in the crush I discovered it in the hands of a mutinous boy, about a dozen steps below me, who threatened if I did not give him a sixpence "to kick the

brains hout hof hit." I give the truly amusing boy sixpence and the hat is flung up to me much the worse for wear, while a young girl with a dowdy bonnet and a face swelled with gin asks me in chaff if I am fond of "periwinkles."

The gallery of the Victoria is one of the largest in the world, and will hold, on a modest computation, 2,200 people.