During the early part of the last century, the character of the London Opera House, as a fashionable place of entertainment, and in some other respects, appears to have considerably changed. Before the fire in 1789, the subscription to a box for fifty representations was at the rate of twenty guineas a seat. The charge for pit tickets was at this time ten shillings and sixpence; so that a subscriber who meant to be a true habitué, and visited the Opera every night, saved five guineas by becoming a subscriber. At this time, too, the theatre was differently constructed, and there were only thirty-six private boxes, eighteen arranged in three rows on each side of the house. "The boxes," says Lord Mount Edgcumbe, in his "Musical Reminiscences," "were then much larger and more commodious than they are now, and could contain with ease more than their allotted subscribers; far different from the miserable pigeon-holes of the present theatre, into which six persons can scarcely be squeezed, whom, in most situations, two-thirds can never see the stage. The front," continues Lord Mount Edgcumbe, "was then occupied by open public boxes, or _amphitheatre_ (as it is called in French theatres), communicating with the pit. Both of these were filled, exclusively, with the highest classes of society; all, without exception, in full dress, then universally worn. The audiences thus assembled were considered as indisputably presenting a finer spectacle than any other theatre in Europe, and absolutely astonished the foreign performers, to whom such a sight was entirely new. At the end of the performance, the company of the pit and boxes repaired to the coffee-room, which was then the best assembly in London; private ones being rarely given on opera nights; and all the first society was regularly to be seen there. Over the front box was the five shilling gallery; then resorted to by respectable persons not in full dress: and above that an upper gallery, to which the admission was three shillings. Subsequently the house was encircled with private boxes; yet still the prices remained the same, and the pit preserved its respectability, and even grandeur, till the old house was burnt down in 1789." * * * * * [Sidenote: THE KING'S THEATRE IN 1789.]