What is here stated, was asserted in a cotemporaneous pamphlet, published in this city on the occasion. The New-York reviewers, grossly violating every principle of decency, propriety and justice, assailed the writer, as if he had been guilty of a base fabrication, and had invented this hideous charge, to dishonour the Philadelphia audience. Without any fair opportunity of investigating the facts, they had the decency and modesty to pronounce sentence with an assumption of oracular infallibility. Probably the annals of literature can hardly produce a more unfair attack upon any writer than the review to which I here allude.
A Dramatic Bull.
In a sorry tragedy, called the Fall of Tarquin, written by one Hunt, there is a description of a forest, in which the author has this ludicrous line—
And the tall trees stood circling in a row.[P]
She would and she would not—or the kind Impostor.
The humour of this comedy, in many of the scenes, has hardly ever been exceeded by any writer in any language. The dialogue between Don Manuel and Don Philip, in which the former undertakes to "bamboozle" the son of his friend, whom he conceives to be an arrant impostor, is absolutely a masterpiece of humour. There are several other scenes of nearly equal merit. It is difficult even at this day, to form a correct judgement of Cibber—as the disgrace attached to him by Pope in the Dunciad excited against him a prejudice which at this distance of time continues to operate on the mind of the reader.