With such personages in pit and boxes, we may rest satisfied that there was a public to match in the gallery--a peculiar as well as a general public. A line in a prologue of the year 1672, "The stinking footman's sent to keep your places," alludes to a custom by which the livery profited. Towards the close of the century, the upper gallery of Drury Lane was opened to footmen, _gratis_. They were supposed to be in attendance on their masters, but these rather patronised the other house, and as Drury could not attract the nobility, it courted the favour of their not very humble servants. Previously, the lacqueys were admitted after the close of the fourth act of the play. They became the most clamorous critics in the house. It was the custom, when these fellows passed the money-taker, to name their master, who was supposed to be in the boxes; but many frauds were practised. A stalwart, gold-laced, thick-calved, irreverent lacquey swaggered past money and check-taker one afternoon, and named "the Lord ----," adding the name which the Jews of old would never utter, out of fear and reverence. "The Lord ----!" said the money-taker to his colleague, after the saucy footman had flung by, "who is he?" "Can't say," was the reply; "some poor Scotch lord, I suppose!" Such is an alleged sample of the ignorance and the blasphemy of the period. Returning to the pit, I find, with the critics and other good men there, a sprinkling of clerical gentlemen, especially of chaplains; their patrons, perhaps, being in the boxes. In the papers of the day, in the year 1697, I read of a little incident which illustrates social matters, and which, probably, did not much trouble the theatrical cleric who went to the pit so strangely provided. "There was found," says the paragraph, "in the pit of the playhouse, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, on Whitsun Eve, a qualification, signed by the Right Honourable the Lord Dartmouth to the Reverend Mr. Nicholson, to be his Chaplain Extraordinary; the said qualification being wrapped up in a black taffety cap, together with a bottle-screw, a knotting needle, and a ball of sky-colour and white knotting. If the said Mr. Nicholson will repair to the pit-keeper's house, in Vinegar Yard, at the Crooked Billet, he shall have the moveables restored, giving a reasonable gratitude." Probably Mr. Nicholson did not claim his qualification. His patron was son of the Lord Dartmouth who corresponded with James II. while expressing allegiance to William III., and was subsequently Queen Anne's Secretary of State, and the annotator of Burnet's _History of his Own Times_.