Also there was dinner beforehand--my first experience of chicken and
champagne. And then there is a great break till the real theatre rises
stately and splendid, like Britannia ruling the waves--nay, Britannia
herself, or, as they call it lovingly down Shoreditch way, "the Brit."
When to my fashionable friends I have held forth on the glories and the
humours of "the Brit.," they have taken it for granted, and I have lacked
the courage or the energy to undeceive them, that my visits to this
temple of the people were expeditions of Haroun Al Raschid in the back
streets of Bagdad or adventures of Prince Florizel in Rupert Street; but
of a truth I have climbed the gallery stairs in sober boyish earnestness,
elbowed of the gods, and elbowing, and if I did not yield to the
seductions of "ginger-beer and Banbury" that filled up clamantly the
entr'actes, 't was that I had not the coppers. "Guy Fawkes" was my first
piece, in the days when the drama's "fireworks" were not epigrams, and so
the smell of the sulphur still purifies the air. All the long series of
"London successes," with their array of genius and furniture, have faded
like insubstantial pageants, but the rude vault piled with flour-barrels
for the desperado's torch is fixed as by chemic process.
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