These theatres were not open all the year round, but it was reckoned that 20,000 people went every night to the theatre. There are now thirty theatres at least open nearly the whole year round. I doubt if there are many more than 20,000 at all of them together on an average in one night. Yet London has doubled, and the visitors to London have been multiplied by ten. It is by the visitors that the theatres are kept up. The people of London have in great measure lost their taste for the theatres, because they have gone to live in the suburbs. Who, for instance, that lives in Hampstead and wishes to get up in good time in the morning can take his wife often to the theatre? It takes an hour to drive into town, the hour after dinner. The play is over at a little after eleven; if he takes a cab, the driver is sulky at the thought of going up the hill and getting back again without another fare; if he goes and returns in a brougham, it doubles the expense. Formerly, when everybody lived in town, they could walk. Again, the price of seats has enormously gone up. Where there were two rows of stalls at the same price as the dress circle--namely, four shillings--there are now a dozen at the price of half a guinea. And it is very much more the fashion to take the best places, so that the dress circle is no longer the same highly respectable part of the house, while the upper boxes are now ‘out of it’ altogether, and, as for the pit, no man knoweth whether there be any pit still. [Illustration: Jn. B Buckstone -JOHN BALDWIN BUCKSTONE-] Besides, there are so many more distractions; a more widely spread habit of reading, more music, more art, more society, a fuller life. The theatre was formerly--it is still to many--the only school of conversation, wit, manners, and sentiment, the chief excitement which took them out of their daily lives, the most delightful, the most entrancing manner of spending the evening. If the theatre were the same to the people of London as it used to be, the average attendance, counting the visitors, would be not 20,000 but 120,000. The reason why some of the houses were open for six months only was that the Lord Chancellor granted a licence for that period only, except to the patent houses. The Haymarket was a summer house, from April to October; the Adelphi a winter house, from October to April.