The middle gallery is fill'd with the middle part of the city, and your high exalted galleries are grac'd with handsome footmen, that wear their master's linen."[A] [Footnote A: The footmen were sometimes sent, early in the afternoon, to keep places in the theatre until their masters or mistresses should arrive.

They created so much disturbance, however, that a stop had to be put to the practice, and the servants were relegated to the upper gallery.

To this they were given free admission.] And now for a few pages about Drury Lane's rival, the theatre within the walls of the old tennis court in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

It was the home of the company headed by the noble Betterton, the "English Roscius," who had, in 1695, headed the revolt against the management of the other house.

At that time the tide of popular success at Drury Lane had reached a rather low ebb, a painful circumstance due, no doubt, to the fickleness of a public that was beginning to tire of the favourite players and to betray a fondness for operatic and spectacular productions rather than the "legitimate." Christopher Rich, the manager of the theatre, was, like many of his kind, more given to considering the weight of his purse than the scant supply of sentiment with which nature might originally have endowed him, and so he tried to do two characteristic things.