As a rule, a boy will do anything, or almost anything, to go to a theatre.  His delight in the drama is extreme—­it possesses and absorbs him completely.  Mr. Pepys has left on record Tom Killigrew’s “way of getting to see plays when he was a boy.”  “He would go to the ’Red Bull’ (at the upper end of St. John Street, Clerkenwell), and when the man cried to the boys—­’Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?’ then would he go in and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays.”  In one of his most delightful papers, Charles Lamb has described his first visit to a theatre.  He “was not past six years old, and the play was ‘Artaxerxes!’ I had dabbled a little in the ’Universal History’—­the ancient part of it—­and here was the Court of Persia.  It was being admitted to a sight of the past.  I took no proper interest in the action going on, for I understood not its import, but I heard the word Darius, and I was in the midst of ‘Daniel.’  All feeling was absorbed in vision.  Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me.  I knew not players.  I was in Persepolis for the time, and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper.  I was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires.  It was all enchantment and a dream.  No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams.”  Returning to the theatre after an interval of some years, he vainly looked for the same feelings to recur with the same occasion.  He was disappointed.  “At the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, discriminated nothing.  I felt all, loved all, wondered all—­’was nourished I could not tell how.’  I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist.  The same things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference was gone!  The green curtain was no longer a veil drawn between two worlds, the unfolding of which was to bring back past ages, to present a ’royal ghost’—­but a certain quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those parts.  The lights—­the orchestra lights—­came up a clumsy machinery.  The first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter’s bell—­which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice; no hand seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning.  The actors were men and women painted.  I thought the fault was in them; but it was in myself, and the alteration which those many centuries—­of six short twelvemonths—­had wrought in me.”  Presently, however, Lamb recovered tone, so to speak, as a playgoer.  Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the present attraction of the scene, and the theatre became to him, “upon a new stock, the most delightful of recreations.”