present edifice was built by B. Wyatt, Esq. Covent Garden Theatre owes its rise to the loss of Drury Lane by Rich, as before stated. The Beggars' Opera' having made Rich gay, and Gay rich," the former grew more magnificent in his ideas, and exerted himself to get a theatre erected in Covent Garden, which he opened in 1733, Hogarth making memorable his transit from Lincoln's Inn Fields by an amusing satirical print. This building was burnt in 1808, then rebuilt by Smirke (after the model of the grand Doric Temple of Minerva at Athens), adorned with statues and some beautiful basso-relievos by Flaxman, and re-opened in 1809. It was here that Kemble carried on the work of stage-reformation which Garrick had begun-here that for so many years with his sister, the illustrious Siddons, he played the Shaksperian drama, as we must scarcely hope ever again to see it played—and here, it must be added, that he experienced, with an indignation that might lessen, but could not prevent, the anguish of a high nature exposed to the most gross insults, what it is to be an actor, if, under all circumstances, you will also be a man. It was the rise of prices consequent on the opening of the new Theatre, under his management, that brought on the notorious O. P. riots. The "Little Theatre in the Haymarket" (as all its managers seem to call it, with a sort of affectionate patronising air, perhaps because, generally speaking, it seems to have been the means of a very satisfactory kind of patronage of them) was first erected about 1720. Here, in 1735, Henry Fielding opened the season with the "Great Mogul's Company," and acted his own Pasquin for forty nights, when he was obliged to shut up the house in consequence of the Licensing Act of 1736. And subsequently Foote, to avoid a similar conclusion, gave "tea," and made it one of the most popular places of amusement in London by his own great but sadly misdirected talents. Lastly, we may observe that the Haymarket owes its present privileges to nothing more nor less than Foote's leg, which the comedian happening to break at a hunting party of fashionables, when the Duke of York was present, obtained a licence for life for the Haymarket as a summer theatre by way of compensation, and which was subsequently made permanent: such are the considerations by which we decide in England whether two or three-theatres shall represent Shakspere! The remaining places of dramatic entertainment in the metropolis are the Lyceum or English Opera House, the Adelphi, the Strand, the Olympic, the Princess's in Oxford Street, a very beautiful little house of recent erection, the Prince's in St. James's Street, the Royal Fitzroy or Queen's in Tottenham Street, Tottenham Court Road, the City of London at Norton Falgate, Sadler's Wells, the Pavilion in Whitechapel, and the Garrick in Goodman's Fields-all on the City side of the water; whilst on the other are the Surrey, the Victoria, and Astley's, the latter, however, chiefly used for equestrian exhibitions. Here is ample room for the expansion of a growing drama, whenever the legislature shall become convinced that the people who attend all these minor theatres would really be no worse if plays were substituted for burlettas, Love in a Village' for My Poll and my Partner Joe,' Shakspere for Van Amburgh. Of course the patentees of the two principal theatres must be perfectly indifferent by this time on the matter. It would be too good a jest now to urge the possibility of injury to the properties in their present state by any course that might be determined upon with respect to the lesser houses, always excepting that a reversal of the former state of

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things could be settled by law: the regular drama to the minors, and the burlettas, and nautical pieces, and the lions to the majors-that were something for both parties; as equitable and suitable an adjustment perhaps as could be devised. We commend it to the attention of those who have been very naturally surprised and irritated at the late aspect of affairs, in which they have so deep an interest; who have seen the habitual course of these theatres interrupted,their best friends alienated, friends at least who had stood by these theatres in their poverty and degradation, and were willing to stand by them apparently through even worse stages of both, their very character blackened by pretended necessities of reformation; who, in short, had lived to see the preposterous attempt made to preserve to their theatres these privileges by proving they were deserved, and who of course, therefore, nipped the mischief in its bud: and if in so doing they have lost their rents, who shall say they have not preserved at least what appears to have been their consistent principles? But seriously, it must now be evident to all reflecting persons, that these patent rights must be abolished, before the drama can be re-invigorated by the only certain cure-the creation of a new

literature, appealing to, and reflecting the feelings, ideas, and character of the age; before a new, and, as a body, higher race of actors can arise to do justice to such a literature; before we shall be able to sit down in a house small enough to enable us at once to see and to hear, and at the representation of a piece worthy of a sensible man or woman's thoughtful attention. For all this there needs only, we believe, a single and easy remedy, namely, "That," in the words of an article on this long-debated question, written so far back as 1823,* the theatres of the Metropolis should be licensed for the enactment of the English drama without distinction or limit."

CAPTAIN BECROFT, or some other of our recent visitors to the Niger, was requested by one of the sable potentates of that region to bring him, from England, a couple of brass guns, and a strong chest with iron bands and padlocks. His Majesty wished for nothing more-if he had these he had everything. The guns would bring him in money, and the chest would keep it safe. This negro prince must have been a philosopher: Locke, Montesquieu, Bentham-not one of our theorists upon government has ever simplified its principles to such an extent. In practice, however, all governments have been much of a mind with the monarch sage of Nigritia. The treasury is the key-stone of the arch of Government. To get money, whether by brass guns or taxes, and to keep it safe, whether in a chest with iron bands and locks, or in a Treasury, or in a Bank of England, these constitute the whole duty of a statesman. There, then, in that building which figures at the top of the present paper, is deposited the talisman that keeps together the social fabric of the British empire. The seal of Solomon possessed not a tithe of its mystic power.

We smile at the idea of a negro prince's treasury being formed out of the chest, perhaps, of some sailor who may have died on the voyage out. The transformation is not a whit more startling than that by which the royal Treasury of England was manufactured out of a cock-pit. When bluff Harry VIII. had stripped Wolsey of Whitehall, and some other valuable possessions, he con

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structed there for the amusement of his leisure hours, a tennis-court, a cock-pit, and a bowling-green. The scenes of the more healthy and humane amusements of tennis and bowling have left no trace behind them, but we can track the cockpit through all its transmutations-from a place where cocks fought to a place where polemical divines and jobbing politicians wrangled, until it settled down into a Treasury.

In the year of grace 1708, thus wrote Mr. Edward Hatton :-"The Treasury office is kept at the Cock-pit, near Whitehall, where the Lord High Treasurer sits three or four times a week, to receive petitions and determine and settle matters, and give orders, warrants, &c. relating to the public treasure and revenues, the Customs, Excise, &c. being under his lordship's inspection." At that time, therefore, the Lord High Treasurer seems in a manner to have been little more than a tenant at will in the Cock-pit. The Cock-pit was still the cock-pit in those days, not the permanent office of the treasurer, much less was it the Treasury. It might have pleased her Majesty Queen Anne to direct the Lord High Treasurer, Sydney Earl of Godolphin, who was "perfectly in the favour of his queen and country, who had repeated their great satisfaction with his wise and frugal management," to occupy some other apartments, the property of the crown. Nay, the Lord High Treasurer had not the whole Cock-pit to himself, his secretary and clerks; for "the office of Trade and Plantations" (as yet there was neither "Board of Trade," nor "Secretary of War and the Colonies") also found a domicile in the Cock-pit. Then the Treasurer transformed the Cock-pit, by his temporary occupancy, into a Treasury; now the Treasury transforms its principal occupant, pro tempore, into the First Lord of the Treasury. In those old times the man made the office; in ours the office makes the man. Formerly the nation was governed by statesmen; now it is governed by offices and establishments. The machinery which man has made whirls its maker about with or against his will.

But to return to the Cock-pit. Pennant republished in his London' an old print of the Horse-Guards (that is, of the stables adjoining the Tilt-yard, occupied by the horse-guards) in the time of Charles II., in which the Cock-pit, the future Treasury of England, occupies a tolerably conspicuous position. The picture is in good moral keeping. Charles, with his spaniels, is lounging in front, with an empty and expensive cockpit behind him, which in the reign of his niece was to be converted by the "frugal" Godolphin into a well-filled Treasury. This is the part of the Treasury buildings which fronts Whitehall; the venerable, antique, somewhat moss-grown pile, stuck in between the smugness of the dowager Lady Dover's round house and the equal smugness of the bastard Hellenism of the new Board of Trade. This is in good moral keeping too. The Treasury looks like an old shrivelled usurer, in an old-fashioned dress, standing between two smart gentlemen arrayed in Stultz' last device.

The old office of Godolphin, however, is but a small part of the modern Treasury. Indeed, to judge by a plan of the interior in the King's Library, in the British Museum, it would appear to be almost entirely occupied by the hall of entrance, the porter's and watchman's lodges, and other subordinate receptacles. The offices of the more important functionaries are in the large building behind which fronts the esplanade in St. James's Park. It is not every man who is gifted with the power of painting pictures with words, as was the case with the