was thought worth while to prosecute the managers for presenting dramatic exhibitions.  For although an Act, passed in the 28th year of George III., enabled justices of the peace, under certain restrictions, to grant licenses for dramatic entertainments, their powers did not extend to within twenty miles of London.  Lambeth was thus neutral ground, over which neither the Lord Chamberlain nor the country justices had any real authority, with this difficulty about the case—­performances that could not be licensed could not be legalised.

The law continued in this unsatisfactory state till the passing, in 1843, of the Act for Regulating Theatres.  This deprived the patent theatres of their monopoly of the “regular drama,” in that it extended the Lord Chamberlain’s power to grant licenses for the performance of stage plays to all theatres within the parliamentary boundaries of the City of London and Westminster, and of the Boroughs of Finsbury and Marylebone, the Tower Hamlets, Lambeth, and Southwark, and also “within those places where Her Majesty, her heirs and successors, shall, in their royal persons, occasionally reside;” it being fully understood that all the theatres then existing in London would receive forthwith the Chamberlain’s license “to give stage plays in the fullest sense of the word;” to be taken to include, according to the terms of the Act, “every tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, burletta, interlude, melodrama, pantomime, or other entertainment of the stage, or any part thereof.”

Thus, at last, more than a century after the passing of the Licensing Act, certain of its more mischievous restrictions were in effect repealed.  A measure of free trade in theatres was established.  The Lord Chamberlain was still to be “the lawful monarch of the stage,” but in the future his rule was to be more constitutional, less absolute than it had been.  The public were no longer to be confined to Drury Lane and Covent Garden in the winter, and the Haymarket in the summer.  Actors were enabled, managers and public consenting, to personate Hamlet or Macbeth, or other heroes of the poetic stage, at Lambeth, Clerkenwell, or Shoreditch, anywhere indeed, without risk of committal to gaol.  It was no longer necessary to call a play a “burletta,” or to touch a note upon the piano, now and then, in the course of a performance, so as to justify its claim to be a musical entertainment; all subterfuges of this kind ceased.

It was with considerable reluctance, however, that the Chamberlain, in his character of Licenser of Playhouses, divested himself of the paternal authority he had so long exercised.  He still clung to the notion that he was a far better judge of the requirements and desires of playgoers than they could possibly be themselves.  He was strongly of opinion that the number of theatres was “sufficient for the theatrical wants of the metropolis.”  He could not allow that the matter should be regulated by the ordinary laws of supply and demand, or by any