background of ballerisée, Mr. Bunn never "went in" for "leg pieces" simply as such; nor in the terrible indictment framed against him by the writers in Punch, and which he met with a more terrible rejoinder, was any specific charge of sanctioning indecency in costume brought against him.

A few words, ere I leave the stage costumes of the past, may be devoted to Her Majesty's Theatre. I can remember the Italian Operahouse under the management of Mr. Monk Mason, of Mr. Laporte, and of Mr. Lumley. Then came the great Costa and Persiani secession, and the bifurcation of operatic interests, and a cloud of new men, Beales, Delafields, E. T. Smiths, Maplesons, e tutti quanti. I need scarcely point out to a lyrical habitué that the Italian opera `cannot get on without a certain amount of leg. Sir, I have seen the delicious legs of Marie Malibran in Fidelio. Judices, twenty-two years have elapsed since, at Covent Garden (the old, not the new theatre), I first saw Alboni in the green-velvet tunic and white-silk tights of Maffeo Orsini, and in the black-satin trunk-hose of the young cavalier-I have forgotten his name-in Maria di Rohan, who sings "Per non istar al ozio." Sir, I have seen the legs of Brambilla as Pippo.

Sir, there is a "leg part," I believe, in the Huguenots; there is one in Anna Bolena; there is one in Semiramide; there is one in Orfeo; there is one in the Gazza Ladra. I never saw Giulia Grisi's legs; she was the Queen of Spain, and was legless. She was Norma; and when a Druidess showed her legs, she was as irrecoverably lost as a vestal virgin who had let the fire out. In the Figlia del Reggimento, and in the year 1851, just the slightest suspicion of Jenny Lind's ankles, clad in white stockings, was visible. But the curtain of devout domesticity very speedily dropped over that pretty sight. The Opera ballet remained, and in that department you may think, O you heedless and inconsequent young man of the period, that the female leg was rampant. I declare that it was not. There are still extant, in biscuitchina, two charming statuettes of Taglioni and Fanny Ellsler. One is on view to this day, if I mistake not, at a porcelain warehouse in the Strand, and you may buy it for a trifling matter of six guineas. Go and look at it, young man. Look also at the full-length portraits of the great ballet-dancers of yore, which Chalon used to draw, which Lane lithographed, and Mitchell published. Look at the noble group of the Pas de Quatre, the grandest choregraphic achievement perhaps that the world has ever seen, and which was devised by the accomplished Mr. Lumley as a crowning attraction to his "Long Thursdays” -the group which Mr. John Gilbert drew, more than twenty years since, for the Illustrated London News.* Study these monuments of bygone stage costumes, and you must be fain to admit that the balletdancers of a generation since dressed decently, and that although the

The original sketch for this remarkable drawing was made, I believe, by a clever Frenchman named Guys, and when I saw it, in 1847, was in the possession of Albert Smith.

rapid movements of the dance made brevity of skirt a thing of necessity, there was a vast difference between the fair professors of the poetry of motion of that epoch, and the shameless jades who caper now at our theatres and music-halls, in attire so scandalous, and with gesture so abandoned, that were they Egyptian Almé or Ghawazie, they would very speedily find themselves the objects of the attentions of the police of Grand Cairo. Yet, subdued as was the ballet of the past in comparison with that of the present, it was sufficient to shock the not very squeamish Theodore Hook, who described the petticoats of balletgirls as "fringes to their stays;" and it absolutely horrified Thomas Carlyle, who once went to the Opera, and drew an appalling picture of semi-nude young women "commanded to stand on one leg, in the Devil's name." Cerrito's petticoats would be called prudishly lengthy now; yet when Cerrito went to St. Petersburg, the kind Empress of Russia (Nicholas's Czarina) sent for her, and begged her "d'allonger un peu ses jupons." O times, O manners! That Czarina's son came to Paris in 1867, and, while yet his travelling-boots were green, he hurried to see Schneider "kicking up behind and before." And the Crown-Prince of Sweden, they say, fell desperately in love with Cora Pearl, who "came out"-but very speedily went in again-as Cupidon, being mainly attired in a pair of blue-satin boots and diamonds.

I leave my starting-point, '36, from which I have striven not to wander, save when argument imperatively demanded a digressive illustration. I was taken abroad, to school, and had nothing more to do with theatres until the year 1841, when, two members of my family happening to be engaged at the Princess's Theatre, I used to go behind the scenes, and for two or three years I spent my evenings at the wings, in the greenroom, or in the "flies," very nearly every night that the theatre was open. I have a dim remembrance of a slim, fair, handsome lad in a cloak, who used to come behind the scenes, too, pretty frequently, with a portfolio under his arm, in which portfolio he would make, from time to time, notes with a pencil. Unless I gravely err, the slim lad has grown up to be a Royal Academician of great renown, and by the name of John Everett Millais. All our playbills at the Princess's, between 1841 and 1843, are tolerably well graven in my memory. We played operas, ballets, comedies, tragedies, farces, everything. A'Beckett, Albert Smith, Charles Kenney, wrote burlesques for us. Our ladies sometimes showed their legs, but we had no "leg pieces." The Venus de' Medici didn't troll nigger-songs, and the Venus of Milo didn't indulge in "breakdowns." Neither the Medicean Venus nor she of Milo are popular now. "Tis the Callipygian Aphrodité that rules the world dramatic. It was at the Princess's during this time that Eugénie Garcia was prima donna in an extended répertoire of Italian operas "done into English;" that Tom Thumb, accompanied by his "guardian," P. T. Barnum, made his first bow before an English public; that Wright and the Keeleys and Walter Lacy and Oxberry set houses a roar with their infinite wit and drollery. Then I went away from

the Princess's to school again, for two or three years, and I came back in 1846 as a "professional"-not as an actor; I never put on stage costume or ventured on the boards but once, and that was as an amateur, for the benefit of a friend. I remember that I didn't know what to do with my arms and legs, and that the principal impression on my mind was that I was standing on a remarkably small quadrangular island of deal board, in the midst of a blazing sea of gas. The professional avocations I performed at the Princess's in '46 included assistance in the painting-room-the blue part of many radiant Italian skies, and the white portion of many stone walls on several "flats" and "drops," are due to my pencil-the copying of pieces from the authors' manuscript, and the "parts" thereof, the translating of pieces from the French, the conducting of a considerable amount of the managerial correspondence; the filling-up of "orders," the composition of advertisements for the newspapers, and the occasional taking of checks at the doors at night. These various services were remunerated at the modest rate of fifteen shillings a-week: not a very splendid salary, you may opine; but I know I lived very comfortably on my little stipend, owed no man aught, generally had a few pence left on Saturdays to spend at a bookstall-how I "saved-up" to buy Simson's Euclid! a work which to this day is to me as delightful reading as the Arabian Nights-and was, altogether, as jolly as a sandboy. When there was any surplus, I was very glad (being always an admirer of the sex) to share twopennyworth of almond-rock with a ballet-girl. I have a lurking fondness for the "rock" even now-preferring that "nubbly" sort which disintegrates in your mouth in soft splinters; but I fear that the modern ballet-girl to whom I offered my homages would expect several diamond bracelets and a brougham and pair. Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans. But I was not twenty in '46; and, dear Béranger, in this artificial age young men of twenty want more than fifteen shillings a-week. They smoke, and wear plated watchguards, and "spoon" over the young ladies at the luncheon-bars.

The reader may imagine that, fired by the noble example of Father Newman and the Right Honourable Mr. Gladstone, I am inditing a "chapter of autobiography" in lieu of an essay on stage costume; but my object in publishing this paper is simply to mark from actual experience, and from what my own eyes have seen, the different phases of stage manners which have occurred within my time. For instance, during my second sojourn at the Princess's we brought out the Midsummer-Night's Dream-Vestris in her old part of Oberon, Harley as Bottom, with a great deal of ballet-spectacle added thereto. Macready came, and we produced Henry Taylor's noble play of Philip van Artevelde, which was splendidly "mounted," and was all but damned. James Wallack-most genial and most gentlemanly of melodramatic actorscame and played Massaroni in the Brigand, and Don Cæsar de Bazan, and Monseigneur. Charles Mathews sustained a score of his best characters. Anna Thillon entranced us in the Crown Diamonds and

the Siren. My familiarity with theatricals was not confined to one house. When my manager gave me a holiday, I begged an order from some dramatic friend, and went to the play somewhere else. Did not the waiter at the Albion, when he had a holiday, spend it in helping a friend, another waiter, to lay knives and forks at the London Tavern? I went about to the "Garden" and the "Lane," to the Surrey and the "Vic," to the Lyceum and the Strand; not idly or in quest of new amusement, however, but actuated by a then very stern and definite purpose, for I was determined to be an artist, and sketched everything that came in my way: legs included. Good lack! there is a pretty Life Academy on view now every night at the playhouses.

But the Fates determined that theatres and I were to part company. Whatever the Revolution of 1848 could have had to do with me I was never able satisfactorily to determine; but it is certain that from the political convulsion in question I must date my divorce both from the stage and from pictorial art. The first I abandoned, and the second-owing to one of my eyes going out of town, and declining to come back-abandoned me. Like many other men, unsuccessful through misfortune or through incompetence in some recognised and remunerative calling, I took up the trade of the younger son of the younger brother, of the discharged serving-man and the ostler tradefallen, of the "stickit stibbler" and the uncertificated bankrupt. I don't mean, by this, that I enlisted in the army, or became a schoolmaster, or took to selling coals and corn on commission. No; I "turned Author."

I am, as things go at present, about as bad a playgoer as any member of the Serious Classes could well desire to see. Did theatrical managers depend on me for patronage, or look to my transactions with the boxbook-keeper in the way of stalls and private boxes as a means of replenishing their treasuries, they would find that they were leaning on the rottenest of reeds, and very speedily discover themselves in Basinghall-street. It is possible that you may assume from the foregoing avowal that I am in the habit of making use of the facilities which a slight connection with literature and journalism may afford me to satisfy my theatrical longings cheaply, and go to the play for nothing. Yet I think that it is with extreme rarity that I trouble my good friends the managers for gratuitous admissions. Now and again an urgent appeal is made to me to write to Mr. So-and-so for a box, and with courteous promptitude the ticket I have asked for is sent. Then I have a hurried dinner, attended by I know not what vague odour of violetpowder and warm frizzling-tongs. Then I am deprived of my postprandial cigar, and am dressed up in an absurd mockery of the attire of an undertaker who has a waiter for a twin brother. Afterwards I am crammed into a four-wheeled cab, and on arriving at my unhappy destination I have a row with the cabman. Then I stumble into a huge gas-lit hall, and wander up and down corridors smelling of wet plaster, and breakneck staircases, until at last I am pushed into

a square hole, one side of which being open reveals the stage and auditorium of a theatre; and there for four or five mortal hours, sullen in consequence of my coat, and panting with indigestion, I am compelled to listen to a pack of people talking nonsense, and to whom, as in the case of the bore in a black gown who preaches sermons, there is no right of reply. I differ with almost everything the people on the stage say; but if I were to argue the point with them, there would be a commotion in the house, and I should be turned out. I hate the horribly uncomfortable chair on which I am made to sit, when I should like to be lying on a sofa, reading the last number of the Edinburgh Review, and thinking how much more intellectually gifted I am than the gentleman who wrote that exhaustive article on the disendowment of the Irish Church. I hate the Jewish family in the next box, who, I feel persuaded, have come in with an "order" as I have. I fancy whiffs of the perfume of bear's-grease mingled with fried fish coming from that box. I chafe at the diamond shirt-studs of the Hebrew in the corner; and at the dingy white-kid gloves of the giggling daughters of Jewry, who are craning their necks round the corner in an attempt to espy who the occupants of my box may be. I hate the bald-headed man in the box on the opposite side of the house, who levels his opera-glass at me or my belongings. I hate the dirty red-and-white opera-cloaks in the dress-circle, the monstrous tawdry head-dresses, the sham bracelets and necklaces; the five hundred temporarily animated wax dummies from the hairdressers' shops in the Burlington Arcade, simpering like one; the conceited creatures in the stalls, standing up to stroke their beards and show their watchguards. I hate the grinning acquaintance whose eye has lighted on me he has been going to the play with orders any time these thirty years—and who comes round and knocks at the door of my box, and-confound him!-stops an hour there. If I were to meet that man in the street, I shouldn't know him, unless indeed he were in evening dress, with a white cravat like the wall of a Spanish convent; and that costume I believe is not habitually worn in foro, nor in broad daylight. His name is Toothly-Gumbo Toothly. He says he was at school with me; I don't believe him. At my school we wore rags-not swallow-tailed coats and white cravats. He overflows with theatrical chit-chat. What rubbish the piece is! Don't I remember Bosville in the part of which Toobey-the overweening puppy!-has made such a mess? Have I noticed that Miss De Cobblewobble is getting old and fat? Aren't little Kate St. Maur's legs stunning? I remember the St. Maur? Yes; I remember her. Her name is Pugsby, and her mother used to keep a coal-and-potato shed in Miff's-court, Oxford-market. Gumbo Toothly goes away, but my torture continues. I am under a perpetual nervous apprehension that I shall drop my opera-glass on the head of the man who plays the big drum in a corner of the orchestra. He is a happier man than I, for he has many bars' rest. It is only occasionally that he gives the big drum a thwack. He can read the last edition of the evening paper.