In the days of GEORGE THE THIRD; by which we should most probably not only have been deprived of the attic entertainments of SIGNORS DELPINI and CARNEVALE, but perhaps too have lost some of our best dramatic writers; such as GREATHEAD, HAYLEY, DR. STRATFORD, and TOMMY VAUGHAN: our author, with a sudden kind of repentance, says,
But hence fond thoughts, nor be by passion hurried!
Had he then lived, he now were dead and buried.
Not now should theatres his orders own;
Not now in alehouse signs his face be shewn.
If we might be so presumptuous as to impute a fault to our author, we should say that he is rather too fond of what the French style equivoque.—This partiality of his breaks forth in a variety of places; such as SIR JOSEPH MAWBEY being
———a knowing man in grain,
———MARTIN’s sterling sense, &c. &c.
In the present instance too, where, supposing the noble Marquis to have lived two hundred years ago, he says,
“Not now should theatres his orders own.”
He leaves us completely in the dark, whether by the word orders, we are to understand his lordship’s commands as theatrical anatomist, or the recommendations, which he is pleased to make to the managers of our public amusements, to admit his dependants and servants gratuitously; and which recommendations in the vulgar tongue of the theatres are technically styled orders. If we might hazard an opinion, from the known condescension of his lordship, and his attention to the accommodation of his inferiors, we should be inclined to construe it in the latter sense; an attention, indeed, which, in the case in question, is said to be so unbounded, that he might exclaim with ÆNEAS
Nemo ex hoc numero mihi non donatus abibit.
Should any caviler here object, that for every five shillings thus generously bestowed on the dependant, a proportionate vacuum is made in the pocket of the manager, let him recollect, that it is a first and immutable principle of civil policy, that the convenience of the few must yield to the accommodation of the many; and, that the noble Marquis, as a peer and legislator of Great Britain, is too closely attached to our excellent constitution to swerve from so old and established a maxim.
With respect to the last line of the couplet,