isting any marked proscenium, there is not even sufficient room left for so essential a portion of theatrical architecture. Avarice has made the boxes encroach on the space allotted for the performance, to such a preposterous degree, as to cause them to occupy more room on the stage, than the scenery itself; as to prevent that scenery from remaining visible to the greater portion of the side boxes; and finally, as to make a great part of the audience sit, not facing, but behind, the actors-and offering to these a most grotesque, and often, a most distressing back ground.

THE opera however is a mere exotic, whose performances can only, by their paltriness, commit our national taste, in as far as we choose to admire them. Like most other exotics, it should not, in this country, be expected to exhibit any thing beyond a sickly and pining constitution, totally different from the vigor and beauty which it displays in its native climes.

BUT even at those two national playhouses, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, though there be some attempt at a proscenium, this has neither the judicious disposition, nor the august appearance, which that important part of the edifice should display, in order to fulfil its purpose. Instead of completely separating the house from the stage, by presenting a character distinct from either, it only serves to blend the two, by partaking of the character of both. For, very different in its structure from the proscenia abroad, which appear solid masses of architecture, it shews doors underneath, through which the actors go in and out; and over these doors it shews boxes in which sit the spectators. By means of this singular and confused arrangement, this equivocal proscenium, as it were, dove-tails the house with the stage, confounds the voices and the jokes of laughing spectators with the speeches and groans of dying actors; peoples Cora's desert; brings, in close contact, the Grecian Matron, and the British belle; and makes the distracted Alicia ap

pear to come out of a house, whose windows had been filled with company, invited by herself, to behold her friend Shore's distress.

WHEN the stage is thus blended with the house, the scenery with the boxes, and the actors with the audience, most of the effect of the performance on the eye, and much of its impression on the mind, must needs be lost.

THE side doors for the ingress and egress of the dramatic personages, should ever be made to accord with the peculiar costume of the play; and therefore these lateral apertures, should ever, as abroad they invariably are, be introduced in the moveable side scenes themselves. The proscenium should be kept clear of all apertures, either in the shape of doors, or in that of boxes. Independent of the other inconveniencies here mentioned, these apertures swallow up the voice of the actor; and this is one of the chief reasons why, even in smaller play-houses

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in England, that voice is often so much less distinctly heard, than in larger theatres abroad-where a proscenium, void of apertures, serves on the contrary as a sounding board, and reflects the voice most effectually.

THE architecture of that part of the theatre which is devoted to the audience, necessarily requires several horizontal divisions in its height. The architecture therefore of the other part, which constitutes the proscenium, should, in order to become more distinct and more grand, have no horizontal divisions whatever between its base and its summit; and while a number of smaller columns, or terms, or caryatides ought to support the cielings of the different tiers of boxes, two columns of large dimensions might be made on each side to support the soffit of this proscenium. How appropriate between these columns would be the statues of Thalia and Melpomene; and, over these statues, medallions of the great dramatic writers, antient and modern, interspersed

with comic and tragic masks, and other emblems of Apollo and of Bacchus, the antient patrons of poetry and of the stage!

I am,

Sir,

Your obedient humble Servant,

A. Z.

BIBLIOGRAPHIANA.

AGREEABLY to my promise, in the last number of the Director, under the present article, I now proceed to give. some very general account of the contents of the

HARLEIAN COLLECTION OF BOOKS.

I SHALL take the liberty of making a different arrangement of the books to what appears in the Harleian catalogue;" but shall scrupulously adhere to the num