Thus, ladies and gentlemen, have the committee, through my medium, set forth the not-in-a-hurry-to-be-paralleled plan they have adopted for preserving order and decorum within the walls of their magnificent edifice. Nor have they, while attentive to their own concerns, by any means overlooked those of the cities of London and Westminster. Finding on enumeration that they have, with a with-two-hands-and-one-tongue-to be-applauded liberality, contracted for more gunpowder than they want, they have parted with the surplus to the mattock-carrying and hustings-hammering high-bailiff of Westminster, who has, with his own shovel, dug a large hole in the front of the parish-church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, that, upon the least symptom of ill-breeding in the mob at the general election, the whole of the market may be blown into the air. This, ladies and gentlemen, may at first make provisions _rise_, but we pledge the credit of our theatre that they will soon _fall_ again, and people be supplied, as usual, with vegetables, in the in-general-strewed-with-cabbage-stalks-but-on-Saturday-night-lighted-up- with-lamps market of Covent Garden. I should expatiate more largely on the other advantages of the glorious constitution of these by-the-whole-of-Europe-envied realms, but I am called away to take an account of the ladies and other artificial flowers at a fashionable rout, of which a full and particular account will hereafter appear. For the present, my fashionable intelligence is scanty, on account of the opening of Drury Lane; and the ladies and gentlemen who honour me will not be surprised to find nothing under my usual head!! XVII. THE THEATRE. BY THE REV. G. C. {85} [THE REV. GEORGE CRABBE.] [Mr. Crabbe died 3rd February, 1832, in his 78th year.] * * * * * “Nil intentatum nostri liquêre poetæ, Nec minimum meruêre decus, veetigia Græca Ausi deserere, et celebrare domestica facta.” HOR. A PREFACE OF APOLOGIES. IF the following poem should be fortunate enough to be selected for the opening address, a few words of explanation may be deemed necessary, on my part, to avert invidious misrepresentation. The animadversion I have thought it right to make on the noise created by tuning the orchestra will, I hope, give no lasting remorse to any of the gentlemen employed in the band. It is to be desired that they would keep their instruments ready tuned, and strike off at once. This would be an accommodation to many well-meaning persons who frequent the theatre, who, not being blest with the ear of St. Cecilia, mistake the tuning for the overture, and think the latter concluded before it is begun. —“One fiddle will Give, half-ashamed, a tiny flourish still,”