After this disturbance, the servants were not only deprived of the freedom of the playhouse, but the custom of giving them “vails,” which had theretofore universally prevailed in Scotland, was abolished.  “Nothing,” writes Mr. Arnot, “can tend more to make servants rapacious, insolent, and ungrateful, than allowing them to display their address in extracting money from the visitors of their lord.”  After the riot in the footmen’s gallery, the gentlemen of the county of Aberdeen resolved neither to give, nor to allow their servants to receive, any money from their visitors under the name of drink-money, card-money, &c., and instead, augmented their wages.  This example was “followed by the gentlemen of the county of Edinburgh, by the Faculty of Advocates, and other respectable public bodies; and the practice was utterly exploded over all Scotland.”

It was not only while they occupied the gallery, however, that the footmen contrived to give offence to the audience.  Their conduct while they kept places for their employers in the better portions of the house, appears to have been equally objectionable.  In the Weekly Register for March 25th, 1732, it is remarked:  “The theatre should be esteemed the centre of politeness and good manners, yet numbers of them [the footmen] every evening are lolling over the boxes, while they keep places for their masters, with their hats on; play over their airs, take snuff, laugh aloud, adjust their cocks’-combs, or hold dialogues with their brethren from one side of the house to the other.”  The fault was not wholly with the footmen, however:  their masters and mistresses were in duty bound to come earlier to the theatre and take possession of the places retained for them.  But it was the fashion to be late:  to enter the theatre noisily, when the play was half over, and even then to pay little attention to the players.  In Fielding’s farce of “Miss Lucy in Town,” produced in 1742, when the country-bred wife inquires of Mrs. Tawdry concerning the behaviour of the London fine ladies at the playhouses, she is answered:  “Why, if they can they take a stage-box, where they let the footman sit the two first acts to show his livery; then they come in to show themselves—­spread their fans upon the spikes, make curtsies to their acquaintance, and then talk and laugh as loud as they are able.”

CHAPTER X.

FOOT-LIGHTS.

As the performances of the Elizabethan theatres commenced at three o’clock in the afternoon, and the public theatres of the period were open to the sky (except over the stage and galleries), much artificial lighting could not, as a rule, have been requisite.  Malone, in his account of the English stage prefixed to his edition of “Shakespeare,” describes the stage as formerly lighted by means of two large branches “of a form similar to those now hung in churches.”  The pattern of these branches may be seen in the frontispiece