A Hundred Years Ago
THE SPECTATOR, NOVEMBER 22ND, 1828.
ONE REASON AMONG A. MILLION FOR PREFERRING A. LITTLE THEATER TO A LARGE ONE.
THE temporary migration of the Covent Garden Company to the English Opera-House has given the public one more opportunity Of estimating the amount of gratification it habitually sacrifices to the modern taste for immense theatres. We are sorry to learn that KEAN, who for two or three nights has been seen with more pleasure than he has imparted during the whole of the past season, is to tread these enviable boards but once again. We hoped that time would have been allowed us to become perfectly acquainted with him—an intimacy which, in the wide world of Covent Garden, it is impossible to form. One species of gratification peculiar to a theatre legitimately proportioned was strikingly exemplified— the pin-fall silence in which not only the slightest variation of tone is perceptible all over the house, but which, by testifying the deep interest conceived in what is passing on the stage by the whole assembly, redoubles the interest taken in it by each individual. So agreeable, in short, was the change, that it seemed as though one had escaped from a noisy tap-room into the silence of a hall consecrated to reason and the muses.
The worst nuisance, indeed, of the great theatres—worse even
than the gas when at its worst—is the never-ending hubbub that . . prevails m the . higher regions. The gods keep such a dreadful
pother o'er our heads, that the remotest chance of begetting an illusion, or losing one's self in the interest of the .piece, is entirely out of the question, whilst much of what is said on the stage is often inaudible to those who sit nearest to it. Yet we do not blame the gods : exiled as they are into a limbo of darkness, and almost .beyond ken, the interest which they can take in a comic or tragic dialogue must be much the same as what the jack-claw perched on the steeple-top takes in the transactions of the market-place below. Is it reasonable then to marvel that the inhabitants of Olympus should exercise their sweet voices in every variety of thunder, and .beguile their impatience for the green dragon of the Bottle—their own proper spirit—by marring what concerns them nought ? These limbos can have been built for no other purpose than that of tanta- lizing their inhabitants, and plaguing the rest of the house.
TOBACCO CULTURE.
It has escaped the notice of those who object to monopoly in the growth of corn, that there exists a law prohibiting the growth of tobacco in Great Britain. A doctor, whose name does not at present occur to us, began the culture about the year 1775, in the county of -Roxburgh, and succeeded in raising tobacco of a good quality. The Government took the alarm for the tobacco revenue ; and under the false pretence of its culture injuring the growth of corn for find, suppressed the cultivation by Act of Parliament.
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