There was great gaiety in town generally at this period. The young Queen announced that she would attend the opera once a week--_that_ seemed dissipation enough for her, who had been educated with some strictness in the quietest and smallest of German courts. The weekly attendance of royalty is thus commented upon by Walpole: ‘It is a fresh disaster to our box, where we have lived so harmoniously for three years. We can get no alternative but that over Miss Chudleigh’s; and Lord Strafford and Lady Mary Coke will not subscribe unless we can. The Duke of Devonshire and I are negotiating with all our art to keep our party together. The crowds at the opera and play when the King and Queen go are a little greater than what I remember. The late royalties went to the Haymarket when it was the fashion to frequent the other opera in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields. Lord Chesterfield one night came into the latter, and was asked if he had been at the other house? “Yes,” said he, “but there was nobody but the King and Queen; and as I thought they might be talking business, I came away.”’ The theatres, of course, adopted the usual fashion of reproducing the ceremony of the coronation on the stage. Garrick, considering that he was a man of taste, displayed great tastelessness in his conduct on this occasion. After ‘Henry VIII.,’ in which Bensley played the King, Havard acted Wolsey, and Yates--what was so long played as a comic part--Gardiner, and in which Mrs. Pritchard played the Queen, and Mrs. Yates Anne Boleyn, a strange representation of the ceremonial was presented to the public. Garrick, it is said, knowing that Rich would spare no expense in producing the spectacle at the other house, and fearing the cost of competition with a man than whom the stage never again saw one so clever in getting up scenic effects till it possessed Farley, contented himself with the old, mean, and dirty dresses which had figured in the stage coronation of George II. and Caroline. The most curious incident of Garrick’s show was, that by throwing down the wall behind the stage, he really opened the latter into Drury Lane itself, where a monster bonfire was burning and a mob huzzaing about it. The police authorities did not interfere, and the absurd representation was continued for six or seven weeks, ‘till the indignation of the public,’ says Davis, ‘put a stop to it, to the great comfort of the performers, who walked in the procession, and who were seized with colds, rheumatism, and swelled faces, from the suffocation of the smoke and the raw air from the open street.’ Their Majesties did not witness the representation of the coronation at either house. Their first visit was paid to Drury Lane, when the Queen commanded the piece to be played, and her selection was one that had some wit in it. The young bride chose, ‘Rule a Wife and have a Wife.’ The royal visit took place on the 26th of November.