milar style of architecture to that in Lincoln's
Inn Fields. The company removed thither, November 9, in the same year, and
continued performing till the union of the Duke and the King's Companies,
in 1682; and performances were continued occasionally here until 1697. The
building was demolished about April, 1709, and the site is now occupied by
the works of a Gas Light Company.

[1] At the end of Dorset-street, now communicating with Fleet-street,
through Salisbury-square and Salisbury-court.

The Duke's Theatre, as the engraving shows, had a handsome front towards
the river, with a landing-place for visiters by water, a fashion which
prevailed in the early age of the Drama, if we may credit the assertion of
Taylor, the water poet, that about the year 1596, the number of watermen
maintained by conveying persons to the theatres on the banks of the
Thames, was not less than 40,000, showing a love of the drama at that
early period which is very extraordinary.[2] All we have left of this
aquatic rage is a solitary boat now and then skimming and scraping to
Vauxhall Gardens.

[2] The _Globe_, the _Rose_, and the _Swan_, were on Baukside;
besides which there were, either then or after, six other
theatres on the Middlesex bank of the Thames.

The upper part of the front will be admired for its characteristic taste;
as the figures of Comedy and Tragedy surmounting the balustrade, the
emblematic flame, and the wreathed arms of the founder.

Operas were first introduced on the English stage, at Dorset Gardens, in
1673, with "expensive scenery;" and in Lord Orrery's play of Henry V.,
performed here in the year previous, the actors, Harris, Betterton, and
Smith, wore the coronation suits of the Duke of York, King Charles, and
Lord Oxford.

The names of Betterton and Kynaston bespeak the importance of the Duke's
Theatre. Cibber calls Betterton "an actor, as Shakspeare was an author,
both without competitors;" in his performance of _Hamlet_, he profited by
the instructions of Sir William Davenant, who embodied his recollections
of Joseph Taylor, instructed by SHAKSPEARE to play the character! What
a delightful association--to see Hamlet represented in the true vein in
which the sublime author conceived it! Kynaston's celebrity was of a more
equivocal description. He played _Juliet_ to Betterton's _Romeo_, and was
the Siddons of his day; for women did not generally appear on the stage
til