And now the dull, dark day, by the magic power of gas, has been transformed into gay and brilliant night. The thousands who have spent the day sight-seeing are not satiated, and are flocking round the entrances of the various theatres. Let us stand on the stage of the Victoria, and see them to the number of fifteen hundred mounted upon the gallery benches. Through the small door near the ceiling they come down like a Niagara, and you expect to see them hurled by hundreds into the pit. What a Babel of sounds! It is in vain one cries “Horder!” “’Ats off!” “Down in front!” “Silence!” Boys in the gallery are throwing orange peel all over the pit; Smith halloos to Brown, and Brown to Smith; a sailor in a private box recognises some comrades beneath, and immediately a conversation ensues; rivals meet and quarrel; women treat each other to the contents of their baskets—full of undigestible articles, you may be sure, with a bottle of gin in the corner. The play—it is that refreshing drama, the “Battersea Brigand”—proceeds in dumb-show; but the pantomime, the subject of which is, “Wine, War, and Love, and Queen Virtue in the Vistas of Light or Glitter,”—with what a breathless calm, that is ushered in. It is an old silly affair. Harlequin, clown, and pantaloon, are they not all very dreary in their mirth? Yet the audience is in a roar of laughter, and little babes clap their tiny hands, and tears of laughter chase each other down the withered cheeks of age. This night in every theatre of London is a similar scene witnessed. The British public is supposed to be unusually weak at Christmas, and tricks that were childish and stale when George the Third was king, and jokes venerable even in Joe Miller’s time, are still supposed to afford the most uproarious amusement to a people boasting its Christianity, its civilisation, and enlightenment. Of all conventionalisms those of the stage are the most rigid, antiquated, and absurd.