"(Ladies and gentlemen: there has not been
For years a prologue spoken to this play—).
The great, the important day, big with the fate
Of Cato and of Rome."
Sometimes the prologue, in preceding the piece, did so in mournful verse, "As undertaker walks before the hearse;" and in the case of tragedy, it was etiquette for the speaker to be attired in solemn black, generally a court suit. Occasionally, the prologue to an historical tragedy was a brief lecture, for the enlightenment of an ignorant audience. At all times it was held to be a better means of instruction than that followed by French writers of tragedy, through confidants,—
"Who might instruct the pit,
By asking questions of the leading few,
And hearing secrets, which before they knew."
Few men wrote more of them than Garrick, though in that to "Virginia" he says that—
"Prologues, like compliments, are loss of time,