University of Virginia Library

I perceive by the late papers, you have been
entertaining the town with remarks on the Theatre.
As you do not seem from your writings to be
much of an adept in the Thespian arcana, permit
me to give you a few hints for your information.

The Theatre, you observe, begins to answer all
the purposes of a coffee-house. Here you are right;
it is the polite lounge, where the idle and curious
resort, to pick up the news of the fashionable

world, to meet their acquaintances, and to show
themselves off to advantage. As to the dull souls
who go for the sake of the play, why, if their
attention is interrupted by the conversation of their
neighbours, they must bear it with patience; it is a
custom authorized by fashion. Persons who go
for the purpose of chatting with their friends are
not to be deprived of their amusement; they have
paid their dollar, and have a right to entertain
themselves as well as they can. As to those who
are annoyed by their talking, why they need not
listen to it; let them mind their own business.

You are surprised at so many persons using
opera glasses, and wish to know whether they were
all near-sighted. Your cousin, Jack Stylish, has
not explained that matter sufficiently, for though
many mount glasses because it is the go, yet I am
told that several do it to enable them to distinguish
the countenances of their friends across our scantily
illuminated Theatre. I was considerably amused
the other evening with an honest tar, who had
stationed himself in front of the gallery, and with
an air of affected foppishness, was reconnoitring
the house through a pocket telescope. I could
not but like his notion, for really the gods are so
elevated among the clouds, that unless they are
unusually strong of vision, I can't tell how they

manage to discern with the naked eye what is
passing in the little painted world below them.

I think you complain of the deficiency of the
music; and say that we want a greater variety, and
more of it. But you must know that, though this
might have been a grievance in old times, when
people attended to the musicians, it is a thing of
but little moment at present; our orchestra is kept
principally for form sake. There is such a continual
noise and bustle between the acts, that it is
difficult to hear a note; and if the musicians were
to get up a new piece of the finest melody, so
nicely tuned are the ears of their auditors, that I
doubt whether nine hearers out of ten would not
complain on leaving the house, that they had been
bored to death with the same old pieces they have
heard two or three years back. Indeed, many
who go to the theatre carry their own music with
them; and we are so often delighted with the crying
of children by way of glee, and such coughing
and sneezing from various parts of the house by
way of chorus, not to mention the regale of a sweet
symphony from a sweep or two in the gallery, and
occasionally a full piece, in which nasal, vocal,
whistling and thumping powers are admirably
exerted and blended, that what want we of an
orchestra?

In your remarks on the actors, my dear friend,
let me beg of you to be cautious. I would not for
the world that you should degenerate into a critic.
The critics, my dear Jonathan, are the very pests
of society; they rob the actor of his reputation—
the public of their amusement; they open the
eyes of their readers to a full perception of the
faults of our performers, they reduce our feelings
to a state of miserable refinement, and destroy entirely
all the enjoyments in which our coarser sensations
delighted. I can remember the time when
I could hardly keep my seat through laughing at
the wretched buffoonery, the merry-andrew tricks,
and the unnatural grimaces played off by one of
our theatric Jack Puddings; when I was struck
with awful admiration at the roaring and ranting of
a buskined hero, and hung with rapture on every
word, while he was “tearing a passion to tatters
—to very rags!” I remember the time when he
who could make the queerest mouth, roll his eyes,
and twist his body with the most hideous distortions,
was surest to please. Alas! how changed
the times, or rather how changed the taste; I can
now sit with the gravest countenance, and look
without a smile on all such mimicry; their skipping,
their squinting, their shrugging, their snuffling,

delight not me; and as to their ranting and
roaring,
than any such fustian efforts to attain a shallow
gallery applause.

Now, though I confess these critics have reformed
the manners of the actors, as well as the
tastes of the andience, so that these absurdities are
almost banished from the New-York stage, yet do
I think they have employed a most unwarrantable
liberty.

A critic, my dear sir, has no more right to expose
the faults of an actor, than he has to detect the
deceptions of a juggler, or the impositions of a
quack. All trades must live; and as long as the
public are satisfied to admire the tricks of the juggler,
to swallow the drugs of the quack, or to applaud
the fustian of the actor, whoever attempts to
undeceive them, does but curtail the pleasures of
the latter, and deprive the former of their bread.

Ods-bud! hath not an actor eyes, and shall he not
wink?—hath not an actor teeth, and shall he not
grin?—feet, and shall he not stamp?—lungs,
and shall he not roar?—breast, and shall he not
slap it?—hair, and shall he not club it? Is he not

fed with plaudits from the gods? delighted with
thumpings from the groundlings? annoyed by hisses
from the boxes?

If you censure his follies, does he not complain?
If you take away his bread, will he not starve? If
you starve him, will he not die? And if you kill
him, will not his wife and seven small infants, six
at her back and one at her breast, rise up and cry
vengeance against you? Ponder these things seriously,
my friend Oldstyle, and you will agree with
me that, as the actor is the most meritorious and
faultless, so is the critic the most cruel and sanguinary
character in the world—“as I will show you
more fully in my next.”