The place is sometimes changed, too, with the scene,
    Which is transacted as the music plays
    Betwixt the acts.

The closing of the theatres by the Puritans, in 1642, plainly distressed the musicians almost as much as the players.  Their occupation was practically gone, although not declared illegal by Act of Parliament.  “Our music,” writes the author of “The Actor’s Remonstrance,” 1643, “that was held so delectable and precious that they scorned to come to a tavern under twenty shillings for two hours, now wander with their instruments under their cloaks—­I mean such as have any—­into all houses of good fellowship, saluting every room where there is company with:  ‘Will you have any music, gentlemen?’”

At the Restoration, however, king, actors, and orchestra all enjoyed their own again.  Presently, for the first time it would seem in an English theatre, the musicians were assigned that intrenched position between the pit and the stage they have so long maintained.  “The front of the stage is opened, and the band of twenty-four violins with the harpsicals and theorbos which accompany the voices are placed between the pit and the stage.  While the overture is playing the curtain rises and discovers a new frontispiece joined to the great pilasters on each side of the stage,” &c.  So runs one of the preliminary stage directions in the version of Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” arranged by Dryden and Davenant for performance at the Duke’s Theatre, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in 1667.  The change was, no doubt, introduced by Davenant in pursuance of French example.  The authors of the “Histoire Universelle des Theatres” state, regarding the French stage, that after the disuse of the old chorus in 1630, “a la place du chant qui distinguoit les actes et qui marquoit les repos necessaires, on introduisit des joueurs d’instrumens, qui d’abord furent places sur les ailes du theatre, ou ils executoient differens airs avant la commencement de la piece et entre les actes.  Ensuite ils furent mis au fond des troisieme loges, puis aux secondes, enfin entre le theatre et la parterre, ou ils sont restes.”

Theatres differ little save in regard to their dimensions.  The minor house is governed by the same laws, is conducted upon the same system, as the major one.  It is as a humbler and cheaper edition, but it repeats down to minute particulars the example of its costly original.  The orchestra, or some form of orchestra, is always indispensable.  Even that street-corner tragedy which sets forth the story of Punch and Judy, could not be presented without its pandean-pipe accompaniment.  The lowest vagrant theatre must, like the lady in the nursery ballad, have music wherever it goes.  No doubt this is often of most inferior quality, suggestive of a return to very early musical methods.  But poverty constrains to primitiveness.  Mr. Pepys, comparing the state of the stage under Killigrew to what it had been in earlier years, notes:  “Then,