Audiences have always been miscellaneous.  Among them not only youth and age, but rich and poor, wise and ignorant, good and bad, virtuous and vicious, have alike found representation.  The gallery and the groundlings have been catered for not less than the spectators of the boxes and private rooms; yet, upon the whole, the stage, from its earliest period, has always provided entertainment of a reputable and wholesome kind.  Even in its least commendable condition—­and this, so far as England is concerned, we may judge to have been during the reign of King Charles II.—­it yet possessed redeeming elements.  It was never wholly bad, though it might now and then come very near to seeming so.  And what it was, the audience had made it.  It reflected their sentiments and opinions; it accorded with their moods and humours; it was their creature; its performers were their most faithful and zealous servants.

Playgoers, it appears, were not wont to ride to the theatre in coaches until late in the reign of James I. Taylor, the water-poet, in his invective against coaches, 1623, dedicated to all grieved “with the world running on wheels,” writes:  “Within our memories our nobility and gentry could ride well mounted, and sometimes walk on foot, gallantly attended with fourscore brave fellows in blue coats, which was a glory to our nation, far greater than forty of these leathern tumbrels!  Then, the name of coach was heathen Greek.  Who ever saw, but upon extraordinary occasions, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach?  They made small use of coaches; there were but few in those times; and they were deadly foes to sloth and effeminacy.  It is in the memory of many when, in the whole kingdom, there was not one!  It is a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for both appeared at the same time.”  According to Stow, coaches were introduced here 1564, by Guilliam Boonen, who afterwards became coachman to the queen.  The first he ever made was for the Earl of Rutland; but the demand rapidly increased, until there ensued a great trade in coach-making, insomuch that a bill was brought into Parliament, in 1601, to restrain the excessive use of such vehicles.  Between the coachmen and the watermen there was no very cordial understanding, as the above quotation from Taylor sufficiently demonstrates.  In 1613 the Thames watermen petitioned the king, that the players should not be permitted to have a theatre in London, or Middlesex, within four miles of the Thames, in order that the inhabitants might be induced, as formerly, to make use of boats in their visits to the playhouses in Southwark.  Not long afterwards sedans came into fashion, still further to the prejudice of the watermen.  In the Induction to Ben Jonson’s “Cynthia’s Revels,” performed in 1600, mention is made of “coaches, hobby-horses, and foot-cloth nags,” as in ordinary use.  In 1631 the churchwardens and constables, on behalf of the inhabitants of Blackfriars, in a petition to