The initiated became at once aware that Her Most
Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very
evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince
of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of
Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant
visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this
murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the French
_noblesse_, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock
to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.
My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present
exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago,
there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a
rough wooden portico before it,--not unlike such a portico as I have
recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,--and
with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a
man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of
naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or
meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made
Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South
Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from
the French.
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