Charles Lamb was a faithful patron of the pit.  In his early days there had been such things as “pit orders.”  “Beshrew the uncomfortable manager who abolished them!” he exclaims.  Hazlitt greatly preferred the pit to the boxes.  Not simply because the fierceness of his democratic sentiments induced in him a scorn of the visitors to the boxes, as wrapped up in themselves, fortified against impressions, weaned from all superstitious belief in dramatic illusions, taking so little interest in all that was interesting, disinclined to discompose their cravats or their muscles, “except when some gesticulation of Mr. Kean, or some expression of an author two hundred years old, violated the decorum of fashionable indifference.”  These were good reasons for his objection to the boxes.  But he preferred the pit, in truth, because he could there see and hear so very much better.  “We saw Mr. Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach on Friday night from the boxes,” he writes in 1816, “and are not surprised at the incredulity as to this great actor’s powers entertained by those persons who have only seen him from that elevated sphere.  We do not hesitate to say that those who have only seen him at that distance have not seen him at all.  The expression of his face is quite lost, and only the harsh and grating tones of his voice produce their full effect on the ear.  The same recurring sounds, by dint of repetition, fasten on the attention, while the varieties and finer modulations are lost in their passage over the pit.  All you discover is an abstraction of his defects, both of person, voice, and manner.  He appears to be a little man in a great passion,” &c.

But the pit was not famous merely as the resort of critics.  The “groundlings” had given place to people of fashion and social distinction.  Mr. Leigh Hunt notes that the pit even of Charles II.’s time, although now and then the scene of violent scuffles and brawls, due in great part to the general wearing of swords, was wont to contain as good company as the pit of the Opera House five-and-twenty years ago.  A reference to Pepys’s “Diary” justifies this opinion.  “Among the rest here the Duke of Buckingham to-day openly sat in the pit,” records Pepys, “and there I found him with my Lord Buckhurst, and Sedley, and Etheridge the poet.”  Yet it would seem that already the visitors to the pit had declined somewhat in quality.  Pepys, like John Gilpin’s spouse, had a frugal mind, however bent on pleasure.  He relates, in 1667, with some sense of injury, how once, there being no room in the pit, he was forced to pay four shillings and go into one of the upper boxes, “which is the first time I ever sat in a box in my life.”