the licentiousness of the stage," and the office of Licenser of Plays was established. Thus a stop was put to stage-politics: but nevertheless--and although, in an age when parties ran so high, this suppression must materially have diminished the attractiveness of theatrical entertainments--the theatres continued, for many years, and from various causes, to receive a very large share of public attention, and to be made the subject of numerous prose and verse pamphlets, and of occasional caricatures. Pantomime and burlesque were still in vogue, but not to the exclusion of the regular drama; and Shakspeare gained ground, interpreted, as he was, by first-rate actors--by Garrick, Quin, and Macklin, by Mrs Woffington, Mrs Clive, Mrs Cibber, and others. About the middle of the century, the rivalry between Drury and the Garden ran so high as to be a subject of annoyance and inconvenience to the public. "In October 1749 the Covent-Garden company opened the theatrical campaign with _Romeo and Juliet_--a play in which Barry, and especially Mrs Cibber, had shone with peculiar excellence. Garrick had armed himself for the contest: he had prepared a rival actress in Miss Bellamy; and he produced, to the surprise of his opponents, the same play of _Romeo and Juliet_, at Drury Lane, on the very night it came out at Covent Garden. The town was divided for a long time between the two 'Romeo and Juliets,' which produced a mass of contradictory criticism, and finished by almost emptying both houses, for every body began to tire of the monotonous repetition of the same play." There is not much danger, at the present day, of rivalry of this sort. How Garrick and Quin would stare, were they galvanised out of their graves, to see Grisi queen of Covent Garden, and Jullien lord of Drury Lane! Theatrical opposition is a thing nobody now dreams of, unless it be between a French vaudeville company and an English troop of low comedians. And were a contest to arise between the English theatres, it would most likely be of the nature of that which occurred in the reign of George the First, between the rival harlequins, when it was common enough for the two great theatres to bring out pantomimes founded on the same subject--as in 1723, when _Harlequin Dr Faustus_ had great success at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden. That was also the period of the first introduction, on the English stage, of wild beasts, dragons, monsters, and goblins of various kinds, besides mountebanks, tumblers, and rope-dancers. Even Garrick, however, did not disdain the pantomime, when he saw in it the means to annoy and injure a rival. "At the beginning of 1750 he brought out a new pantomime, entitled _Queen Mab_, in which Woodward acted the part of harlequin. The great success of this piece, which drew crowded houses for forty nights, without intermission, gave rise to a very popular caricature, entitled _The Theatrical Steelyard_, in which Mrs Cibber, Mrs Woffington, Quin, and Barry, are outweighed