had caused to many clever industrious, and
struggling families. Miss Freeman, a dancer,
and one of the sufferers, had been sent on the
stage by her parents, who were servants, and
who had pinched themselves to provide her
outfit. Her landlady, who was going to bury her
at her own expense, was a poor shipwright's
wife, with four small children. The wounded
persons also suffered terrible loss. Nodder,
the box-keeper, had lost one hundred and
forty pounds from the previous theatre being
burnt, and had paid Mr. Maurice one hundred
pounds for his situation in the Brunswick
Theatre. Mr. Harris, the stage-door keeper,
who had his leg broken, had a daughter
hurt. This girl had been a music-mistress, and
had supported her father, and had got him his
situation. Mr. Maurice had held two-thirds of
the property of the theatre, and his family was
totally wrecked by the loss. About seven
hundred and fifty pounds were subscribed in the
room.

The day after the accident, a meeting of the
performers at the Brunswick was held at the
Black Horse, in Wells- street, to ascertain who
was missing. The muster-roll was read, and there
was a terrible silence when the names were
called.

The inquest on the bodies was held at the
Court-house, in Wellclose-square, before Mr.
Maurice Thomas, the coroner.

The evidence all went to prove the strange
infatuation with which the proprietors, blindly
eager for reimbursement, had hurried forward
to their ruin. The clerk of the works, the
surveyor, the architect, all knew that the
roof was settling down. The property-man
was so sure of it, that he had determined to
quit the theatre. A gentleman who came to
the play on the Tuesday, and found that the
box-doors would not shut, suspected danger, and left
the theatre. Another person, on seeing the front
wall bulge on the Tuesday, would not enter, but
returned home. Only on the Monday, the
principal carpenter of Drury Lane Theatre had
pronounced that the walls were not strong enough,
or the cement dry enough, to support an iron
roof weighing, with its adjuncts, sixty tons.

The inquest continued till the first week in
April. The evidence of all the witnesses was
characterised by recriminations, pitiful
evasions, and some falsehood. The architect
was anxious to show that he had warned the
proprietors; the surviving proprietor was
desirous to prove that he had never been properly
warned; the builders tried to convince the
jury that they had built the place firmly and
well. The contradictions were sometimes
palpable, as when Mr. Whitwell declared he had
never been warned of the danger, whereas he
himself actually gave in evidence that he had been
up in the flies on the Monday night to examine
the cause of their sinking. Mr. Carruthers, too,
was so nervously anxious about the flies that he
had ordered them to be propped, and yet had
had no surveyor to advise him as to the safety
of the roof.

The eventual verdict was, " Accidental death,
by the fall of the roof of the Brunswick Theatre,
which was occasioned in consequence of hanging
heavy weights thereto; and the jury are of
opinion that the proprietors are highly reprehensible
in allowing such weight to be so attached.
And we fine, in each of the two cases, a deodand
of forty shillings."

A scientific writer of the day, reviewing the
causes of this accident, says it was a very
hazardous experiment to construct walls eighty-eight
feet high, and one hundred and seventeen
feet in length, unsupported by transverse ties,
and only two and a half bricks in thickness.

During the building of these walls, their
vibration, and that of the scaffolding, had been so
great, that tie beams had to be thrown across
the building from wall to wall to keep them,
steady. These ties, when the roof was laid on,
were sawn away, leaving a clear parallelogram
one hundred and seventeen feet by sixty-two
feet. It must be remembered, too, in extenuation
of the architect's remissness, that iron roofs
were little used in 1828. Mr. Carruthers had
never seen one at all till Mr. Whitwell had taken
him down to the Deptford Gasworks and showed
him one, and there told him that if the building
were ever burnt down, the roof would be worth
two-thirds of its original price. Some years
before an iron roof at Messrs. Maudsley's, in the
Westminster-road, had broken down the building,
and this should have been a warning well
known to Mr. Whitwell as an architect.

This terrible accident occupied the public
mind so entirely, that for some time it effaced
even the controversy as to the justice or injustice
of the then recent battle of Navarino. The survivors
published pamphlets, and a poem was written
on the subject. Learned editors also discovered a
passage in Tacitus which described a similar
accident at an amphitheatre at Fidena, and in
which fifty thousand persons were either killed
or maimed.

         WALLACHIAN PEASANTRY.

Two people wonderful for their griminess; two
people living in a hole; half in the ground and
half out of it; are Wallachian peasants. They
are small, they are dark, they are shiny in
patches, they are beautiful. Their large, dark,
soft eyes are full of unspoken poetry and
kindness; and their language, very peculiar in its
cadences, is all vowels—soothing, luxurious,
musical. They live partly under ground, for
warmth in winter, and because digging a
deepish hole in the ground saves much
expense of building; not that building in these
countries is very costly. Mud and straw,
such primitive bricks as the Israelites made
for Pharaoh, all squashed together without
form or shape, are Wallachian building
materials. Their idea of architecture is equally
primitive: not extending, as a rule, much beyond
the British infantine conception of a mud pie.
An irregular oval with a hole at the top, a