dotted about, the huge canvas sheets hang suspended from the roof, and already fairyland is beginning to appear on some of them in response to the magic touch of the artist's brush. A second canvas reveals a huge comic kitchen—it will take a fortnight to paint. A single joint here would fill the window of an average butcher's shop. Every cut is prize meat, indeed; the very penny bottles of ginger-beer are three feet high. Old Drury will ring with laughter on Boxing-night.
I asked Sir Augustus what class of entertainment he best preferred, pantomime, melodrama, spectacular, or opera?
His reply was, "My acts speak for themselves. Do you suppose I should take all this trouble, subject myself to the fads and fancies of singers, if it was not that I delight in all that is most refined and most artistic? I love good music, good flowers, good painting, good everything. In fact, only the best of everything is good enough for me, and my public. My friends say I am too lavish in my expenditure, but I am convinced that there is a large section of the public who fully appreciate a good thing when it is placed before them. Where is the proof? Look at Covent Garden. I have applications for next grand opera season that would more than twice fill the boxes. If you want a good thing you must be prepared to pay for it, and I consider my great success in pantomime has been through trying to elevate the tastes of the public, for I cannot see why an endeavour should not be made to make pantomime a work of art, such as I have always tried to make it. But whatever the performance, whether it be Wagner's masterpieces, a child's Christmas entertainment, a popular melodrama, or an exquisite idyl like Gounod's 'Philémon et Baucis,' everything is worthy of the greatest care. In short, to quote an old maxim, 'If a thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing well.'"
