I think, are the audience sitting there yet,
Still smoking their pipes, and imbibing their beer?”
Upon entering the door, you are called on to pay your money, which is threepence for the saloon and sixpence for the boxes. The saloon is a large space fitted up something like a chapel, or rather a court of justice; there being in front of each seat a species of desk or ledge, which, in the places last named would hold prayer-books or papers, but at the Bower are designed for tumblers and pewter-pots. The audience, like the spirits they imbibe, are very much mixed; the greater portion consisting of respectable mechanics, while here and there may be seen an individual, who, from his seedy coat, well-brushed four-and-nine hat, highly polished but palpably patched highlows, outrageously shaved face and absence of shirt collar, is decidedly an amateur, who now and then plays a part, and as he is never mistaken for an actor on the stage, tries when off to look as much like one as possible.
The boxes are nothing but a gallery, and are generally visited by a certain class of ladies who resemble angels, at least, in one particular, for they are “few and far between.”
But what are the entertainments? A miscellaneous concert, in which the first tenor, habited in a surtout, with the tails pinned back, to look like a dress-coat, apostrophises his “pretty Jane,” and begs particularly to know her reason for looking so sheyi—vulgo, shy. Then there is the bass, who disdains any attempt at a body-coat, but honestly comes forward in a decided bearskin, and, while going down to G, protests emphatically that “He’s on the C (sea).” Then there is the prima donna, in a pink gauze petticoat, over a yellow calico slip, with lots of jewels (sham), an immense colour in the very middle of the cheek, but terribly chalked just about the mouth, and shouting the “Soldier tired,” with a most insinuating simper at the corporal of the Foot-guards in front, who returns the compliment by a most outrageous leer between each whiff of his tobacco-pipe.
Then comes an Overture by the band, which is a little commonwealth, in which none aspires to lead, none condescends to follow. At it they go indiscriminately, and those who get first to the end of the composition, strike in at the point where the others happen to have arrived; so that, if they proceed at sixes and sevens, they generally contrive to end in unison.
Occasionally we are treated with Musard’s Echo quadrilles, when the solos are all done by the octave flute, so are all the echoes, and so is everything but the cada.
But the grand performance of the night is the dramatic piece, which is generally a three-act opera, embracing the whole debility of the company. There is the villain, who always looks so wretched as to impress on the mind that, if honesty is not the best policy, rascality is certainly the worst. Then there is the lover, whose woe-begone countenance and unhappy gait, render it really surprising that the heroine, in dirty white sarsnet, should have displayed so much constancy. The low comedy is generally done by a gentleman who, while fully impressed with the importance of the “low,” seems wholly to overlook the “comedy;” and there is now and then a banished nobleman, who appears to have entirely forgotten everything in the shape of nobility during his banishment. There is not unfrequently a display of one of the proprietor’s children in a part requiring “infant innocence;” and as our ideas of that angelic state are associated principally with pudding heads and dirty faces, the performance is generally got through with a nastiness approaching to nicety. But it is time to make our escape from the Bower, and we therefore leave them to get through the “Chough and Crow”—which is often the wind-up, because it admits of a good deal of growling—in our absence. We cannot be tempted to remain even to witness the pleasing performances of the “Sons of Syria,” nor the “Aunts of Abyssinia.” We will not wait to see Mr. Macdonald sing “Hot codlings” on his head, though the bills inform us he has been honoured by a command to go through that interesting process from “nearly all the crowned heads in Europe.”