[Illustration: THE LITTLE THEATRE, HAYMARKET] At an earlier date some of the audience had actually been seated on the stage among the performers; and there were still in Jane’s time boxes on the stage, but outside the curtain. We can see this in the illustration of the Little Theatre, Haymarket, where the pit comes right up to the footlights, there being no stalls, and the patrons of the pit are seated on backless benches not divided into compartments. We gather from contemporary literature that it was a common thing to go to rehearsals of the performances at the opera, and that there was a coffee-room attached, which formed at least as great an attraction to the idle rich, who loved to chatter sweet nothings, as the piece itself. Kemble was the brother of Mrs. Siddons, and did as much as any man for the improvement of the stage; when he first began his career, he was struck by the ludicrous conventionality of the dresses, which were as much a matter of form as the custom of representing statues of living men “in Roman habit.” He and the great Garrick killed this foolish custom. The conventionalism in matters of dress upon the stage is noticed by the ubiquitous M. Grosley thus— “On the stage the principal actresses drag long trains after them, and are followed by a little boy in quality of a train-bearer, who is as inseparable from them as the shadow from the body. This page keeps his eye constantly upon the train of the princess, sets it to rights when it is ever so little ruffled or disordered, and is seen to run after it with all his might, when a violent emotion makes the princess hurry from one side of the stage to another.” Drury Lane Theatre has an older record than Covent Garden. It dates from 1663, and in 1682 was the only theatre in London, being considered sufficient for the joint representations of the two old established companies of players, The King’s and The Duke’s. It was many times rebuilt, being more than once destroyed by fire; in fact nothing is more striking in the annals of theatres than the astonishing number of times nearly every theatre has been burnt down. The third house was burnt in February 1809, and its successor opened in 1812, with a prologue by Lord Byron. During Jane Austen’s first recorded visit to London, therefore, it would be in course of rebuilding, though on subsequent visits it would be very fashionable, being new. Just as in novels during the lifetime of Jane Austen, there was an enormous change from the grandiloquent and conventional, to the natural and simple, and the same in poetry, so it was on the stage. The absurd conventionalism, the unsuitable dresses, no matter what, so long as they were grand, were exchanged for easy declamation and natural attitude.