The upper part of the front will be admired for its characteristic taste; as the figures of Comedy and Tragedy surmounting the balustrade, the emblematic flame, and the wreathed arms of the founder.

Operas were first introduced on the English stage, at Dorset Gardens, in 1673, with “expensive scenery;” and in Lord Orrery’s play of Henry V., performed here in the year previous, the actors, Harris, Betterton, and Smith, wore the coronation suits of the Duke of York, King Charles, and Lord Oxford.

The names of Betterton and Kynaston bespeak the importance of the Duke’s Theatre.  Cibber calls Betterton “an actor, as Shakspeare was an author, both without competitors;” in his performance of Hamlet, he profited by the instructions of Sir William Davenant, who embodied his recollections of Joseph Taylor, instructed by Shakspeare to play the character!  What a delightful association—­to see Hamlet represented in the true vein in which the sublime author conceived it!  Kynaston’s celebrity was of a more equivocal description.  He played Juliet to Betterton’s Romeo, and was the Siddons of his day; for women did not generally appear on the stage till after the Restoration.  The anecdote of Charles II. waiting at the theatre for the stage queen to be shaved is well known.

Pepys speaks of Harris, in his interesting Diary as “growing very proud, and demanding 20_l_. for himself extraordinary more than Betterton, or any body else, upon every new play, and 10_l_. upon every revive; which, with other things, Sir William Davenant would not give him, and so he swore he would never act there more, in expectation of his being received in the other house;” (this was in 1663, at the Duke’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.) “He tells me that the fellow grew very proud of late, the King and every body else crying him up so high,” &c.  Poor Sir William, he must have been as much worried and vexed as Mr. Ebers with the Operatics, or any Covent Garden manager, in our time; whose days and nights are not very serene, although passed among the stars,

In one of Pepys’s notices of Hart, he tells us “It pleased us mightily to see the natural affection of a poor woman, the mother of one of the children brought upon the stage; the child crying, she, by force, got upon the stage, and took up her child, and carried it away off the stage from Hart.”  This pleasant playgoer likewise says, in 1667-8, “when I began first to be able to bestow a play on myself, I do not remember that I saw so many by half of the ordinary prentices and mean people in the pit at 2_s_. 6_d_. a-piece as now; I going for several years no higher than the 12_d_. and then the 18_d_. places, though I strained hard to go in then when I did; so much the vanity and prodigality of the age is to be observed in this particular.”

It may be at this moment interesting to mention that the first Covent Garden Theatre was opened under the patent granted to Sir William Davenant for the Dorset Gardens and Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatres.  We must also acknowledge our obligation for the preceding notes to the Companion to the Theatres, a pretty little work which we noticed en passant when published, and which we now seasonably recommend to the notice of our readers.