this
royal box appears another enclosure or box, partitioned off
from the rest of the balcony.

The staircases of access to this auditorium are clearly
indicated; one small door at the rear of the _salle_ with
its own private stairway, communicating with the adjoining
building, opens directly into the royal box; as in the Royal
Opera House in Berlin to-day.

There is another door, with a triangular lobby, into the
rear of the left-hand balcony. Two windows are shown on each
side of the house, opening directly into the theatre from
the outer air.

The stage runs clear across the width of the pit, about
thirty-five feet, projecting in an "apron" or _avant scene_
five feet beyond the proscenium wall, and is surrounded on
the three outward sides by a low railing of classic design
about eighteen inches in height, just as in many Elizabethan
playhouses.

If one may trust an elevation of the stage, drawn on the
same sheet to twice the scale of the general plan, the stage
was four feet six inches above the floor of the pit. This
elevation exhibits the surprising feature of a classic
facade, Palladian in treatment, on the stage of what so far
we have regarded as a late modification of a playhouse of
Shakespeare's day. Evidently Inigo Jones contemplated the
erection of a permanent architectural _proscenium_, as the
ancients called it, of the type, though far more modest,
both in scale and ornamentation, of Palladio's Theatro
Olimpico at Vicenza, which we know he visited in about 1600,
some twenty years after its erection. This _proscenium_,
given in plan and elevation, shows a semi-circular structure
with a radius of fifteen feet, two stories in height, of the
Corinthian or Composite order. In the lower story are five
doorways, the centre of which is a large archway flanked by
pedestals, on which are inscribed in Greek characters,
Melpomene--Thalia; over these and over the smaller doors are
tablets.

The second story contains between its lighter engaged
columns, over the four side doors, niches with corbels
below, destined to carry statues as their inscribed bases
indicate. So far as these inscriptions are legible,--the
clearest reading "phocles," probably Sophocles,--these were
to represent Greek dramatists, most