WHEN persons address an audience from the stage, it is usual, either in words or gesture, to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, your servant.” If I were base enough, mean enough, paltry enough, and _brute beast_ enough, to follow that fashion, I should tell two lies in a breath. In the first place, you are _not_ Ladies and Gentlemen, but I hope something better, that is to say, honest men and women; and in the next place, if you were ever so much ladies, and ever so much gentlemen, I am not, _nor ever will be_, your humble servant. You see me here, _most thinking people_, by mere chance. I have not been within the doors of a play-house before for these ten years; nor, till that abominable custom of taking money at the doors is discontinued, will I ever sanction a theatre with my presence. The stage-door is the only gate of _freedom_ in the whole edifice, and through that I made my way from Bagshaw’s {21} in Brydges Street, to accost you. Look about you. Are you not all comfortable? Nay, never slink, mun; speak out, if you are dissatisfied, and tell me so before I leave town. You are now (thanks to _Mr. Whitbread_) got into a large, comfortable house. Not into a _gimcrack-palace_; not into a _Solomon’s temple_; not into a frost-work of Brobdignag filigree; but into a plain, honest, homely, industrious, wholesome, _brown brick playhouse_. You have been struggling for independence and elbow-room these three years; and who gave it you? Who helped you out of Lilliput? Who routed you from a rat-hole five inches by four, to perch you in a palace? Again and again I answer, _Mr. Whitbread_. You might have sweltered in that place with the Greek name {22} till doomsday, and neither _Lord Castlereagh_, _Mr. Canning_, no, nor the _Marquess Wellesley_, would have turned a trowel to help you out! Remember that. Never forget that. Read it to your children, and to your children’s children! And now, _most thinking people_, cast your eyes over my head to what the builder (I beg his pardon, the architect) calls the _proscenium_. No motto, no slang, no popish Latin, to keep the people in the dark. No _veluti in speculum_. Nothing in the dead languages, properly so called, for they ought to die, ay and be _damned_ to boot! The Covent Garden manager tried that, and a pretty business he made of it! When a man says _veluti in speculum_, he is called a man of letters. Very well, and is not a man who cries O. P. a man of letters too? You ran your O. P. against his _veluti in speculum_, and pray which beat? I prophesied that, though I never told any body. I take it for granted, that every intelligent man, woman, and child, to whom I address myself, has stood severally and respectively in Little Russell Street, and cast their, his, her, and its eyes on the outside of this building before they paid their money to view the inside. Look at the brick-work, _English Audience_! Look at the brick-work! All plain and smooth like a quakers’ meeting.