thousand pounds were voted to each of his sisters; and one hundred thousand pounds granted for the purchase of an estate. A public funeral was decreed, and a public monument in St. Paul's. The leaden coffin in which he was brought home was cut into relics. As he was lowered into the vault of St. Paul's Cathedral, the sailors, as if by agreement, tore the flag that covered his coffin into strips, to keep till their dying day, and then leave their children as heirlooms and incitements to glory.

Nor was brave Collingwood forgotten. He was made a baron, and had a pension of two thousand pounds for his life, with an annuity after his death of one thousand pounds to his wife, and five hundred pounds to his two daughters. Two days after the battle of Austerlitz the dead body of Nelson arrived off Portsmouth. Austerlitz was a great blow, but it did not make up for Trafalgar. The body of Nelson lay in state at Greenwich on January 5th, on the 8th it was taken to the Admiralty, and on the 9th was interred in St. Paul's, the Prince of Wales being present, and ten thousand soldiers of the line. Thirty-four years before, a thin, sickly boy, the son of a Norfolk clergyman, had joined his uncle's ship the Raisonnable, of sixty-four guns; this same boy, afterwards the bulwark of England, was now laid in his sumptuous grave, and upon his grave fell the tears of a grateful and sorrow-stricken nation. Our hearts of oak may turn to iron, our rough sailors to dexterous engineers, but will the memory of Nelson ever be forgotten while the blue sea girdles the chalk ramparts of Old England?

K

THE O. P. RIOTS.

THEATRICAL riots have not been unfrequent in English theatres.

There was a great riot at the Portugal Street Theatre in 1721, in Rich's time, when Quin and his brother-actors flashed out their swords and drove out some wild young rakes who had threatened to pink the manager. There was a great scuffle before this at the same house when, wishing to insult the brazen Duchess of Portsmouth, some tipsy gentlemen drew their blades in the pit, and flung blazing flambeaux among the actors on the stage.

There was the Footman's Riot in 1737, and the prodigious mutiny, too, in Garrick's Drury Lane, in 1754, about those foreign dancers. The pit then thrashed the boxes, jumped on the harpsichord, broke up benches, slashed the scenery, and pelted poor Davy's windows in Southampton Street. There was that terrible evening, also, at the Haymarket, when thousands of enraged tailors threatened to surge into the theatre to prevent old Dowton playing The Tailors, or a Tragedy for Warm Weather. One of them was actually bold enough, without even the help of his eight partners, to fling a pair of heavy shears at the great comedian. But as the minnow is to the whale, so were all these popular effervescences compared with those tremendous yet ludicrous disturbances in 1809, which, for no less than sixty-one nights, under the name of the O. P. Riots, agitated London, divided society, and convulsed Covent Garden.

The old Covent Garden Theatre had been burnt down September 20, 1808, it was supposed by the wadding of the musket of one of the Spanish soldiers in Pizarro. Twenty persons perished in trying to save the building. Handel's organ, the wines of the Beef-Steak Club, Munden's wardrobe,

and Miss Bolton's jewels, were all consumed. The new building cost fifty thousand pounds, besides the forty-four thousand five hundred pounds insurance. The Duke of Northumberland generously lent Kemble ten thousand pounds, and sent him the receipt to burn on the day the first stone was laid by the Prince of Wales and the Freemasons, of whom the royal "ne'er-do-weel" was grand master. Mr. Robert Smirke, jun., built the new theatre to resemble the great Doric temple of Minerva on the Acropolis. The roof was one hundred feet long and one hundred and thirty feet wide. The pit had its old twenty benches. The chief obnoxious novelty was that the third tier of boxes, letting for twelve thousand pounds a year, had small ante-rooms opening into a saloon reserved at three hundred pounds a year each for annual renters, only. This especially exasperated the democratic town. A person seated in the back row of the two shilling gallery was eightysix feet from the stage door; in the upper gallery the spectator was one hundred and four feet distant. The house was lit by glass chandeliers in front of each circle, two hundred and seventy wax-candles a night being consumed, while the stage and scenery had their three hundred patent lamps. The prevailing colour of the house was white; the ornaments gold on a light pink ground. So far so good, but no further.

The season of 1808 had been a specially interesting one. Miss Pope," the chambermaid" par excellence for fifty years, had retired. In the same month, Madame Storace, the unapproachable buffa of English opera and musical farce, had also taken her leave; and soon after, Mrs. Mattocks, for nearly sixty years the gayest of stage widows, and the most inimitable of M'Tabs, had made her final curtsey. In the mean time, the management had not been idle. They had got Liston, that fine farceur, as a comic dancer, and Young for nervous tragedy; Incledon for noble sea songs; Munden for extravagant drollery; and Fawcett for harsh comic force. The other house, burnt down in 1808, had no one but Mrs. Jordan on whom to rely. Mrs. Dickons was also a favourite with the Covent Garden public for good sound acting; and, above all, not to mention the grace and majesty of Mrs. Siddons, there was that cheval de bataille, the beautiful Roman lady, Madame Catalani, with a voice that could follow a flute through all its ripplings, and a violin through all its windings.

John Philip Kemble, the son of a Staffordshire manager, born in 1757, had made his first appearance on the London boards as Hamlet, in 1783. He had been the sovereign idol of the public, and hitherto had reigned supreme in their

favour. Age had not yet made him hard, dry, cold, nor pedantic, as that fine critic, Hazlitt, afterwards thought him. Kean's thunderstorm of passionate genius had not yet shaken old Drury to its centre.

The town was menacingly silent. The young men in the public offices (great theatre-goers) alone openly denounced the new prices, the boxes being raised from six shillings to seven shillings, the pit from three shillings and sixpence to four shillings, the galleries alone being left at their former rates of two shillings and one shilling. The extension of aristocratic and exclusive privileges, the new ante-rooms where the Phrynes, Chloës, and Aspasias of the day would flaunt their newly-acquired finery, especially irritated the virtuous town. The Tory papers advocated the new prices, the Whig papers, without exception, the old. Advertisements, letters, and paragraphs, urging combination and resistance, had appeared long before the fatal day of opening. London was ripe for a theatrical mutiny.

Mr. Kemble, proud as Coriolanus, and conscious of the enormous outlay of the proprietors that had compelled the temporary high prices, was defiant and confident. On the morning of the opening, he was seen walking like a Cæsar down Bow Street, on his way to the newspaper offices with paragraphs and letters to influence and direct the public mind in the way it should go, and to assure theatre-goers that it was not by any means the engagement of Madame Catalani that had induced the obnoxious alteration.

It was Monday, the 18th of September, 1809. The new theatre, which had been built in nine months, opened with Macbeth-not one of Kemble's finest performances and the musical farce of the Quaker. The house was crowded, and a great and suspiciously expectant crowd collected also around the street doors. The people in the pit shook down into their places, but were wrangling, argumentative, jostling, and restless. The pretty but rather high-coloured faces in the obnoxious upper tiers looked down anxious and alarmed; and among the rustling silks and glossy satins there were rough, angry-looking men, determinately buttoned up in great uncouth box-coats. Still, quite unconscious of their doom, the little victims played. The apparitions behind the curtain took their pots of beer cheerfully with the army of Macduff. Every one in the pit seemed to carry bludgeons, and the turbulent democracy in the galleries complained bitterly that the "rake" of their seats was so steep that of the actors at the back of the stage they could see only the legs. Meanwhile, the court physician and the two murderers sat at the banquet

table discussing a refreshing quart of half-and-half. Liston joked; Munden twisted his mouth in extravagant drollery; and "black Jack," as the greatest Roman of them all was irreverently called in the green-room, remained stony, imperturbable, statuesque, and imperial.

The bell rang-"Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell." The musicians advanced to the attack in their unmoved mechanical way; the music began. The flute warbled, the drum vibrated, the trombone was projected into space, the violins cut capers, the horns blared. The audience rose and took off their hats, as the whole vocal power of the house appeared and sang "God save the King." All went well. Kemble was right-there was nothing in it after all.

The music ceased, and Mr. Kemble, with his fine heroic face, strode forward in that strange Macbeth attire of his to speak the poetical address for the re-opening. Then broke forth the storm-chaos had come again, chaos and old night. It was like Prospero's island, when Ariel's pack came hurrying to chase, in their wild hunt, Trinculo, Caliban, and Stephano. It was like the House of Commons when it wants to divide, and will no longer be bored. The men in the drab coats turned their broad backs to the stage, or jammed on their hats and leaped upon seats. They barked like dogs at the full of the moon; they groaned, they shouted, they screeched through excruciating cat-calls; they roared, "Off, off-old prices." They yelled execrations; they foamed like the people of Ephesus when the worship of Diana, that brought them all their money, was denounced by St. Paul. They showed in fact, violently and loudly, what absence from the theatre would better have shown, their dislike to the new prices and the new constitution of the house. There is no gratitude in the populace. The public has many pockets, but no heart.

Those strong black brows of Kemble's compressed, those dark luminous eyes clouded; but the proud actor, valuing the "sweet voices" no more than the "reek of the fen," went on reciting, in his thoughtful deliberate way, a prosaic address that claimed the credit of illustrating Shakespeare better than of old, by finer scenery:

"Thus Shakespeare's fire burns brighter than of yore,
And may the stage that boasts him burn no more!'

The dull and lifeless verses ended by allusions to the solidity and expense of the new theatre; expressing a hope that the attempt to raise national taste would be repaid by national liberality.